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The FRIENDLY CLUB 
& OTHER PORTRAITS 

Francis Parsons 




JOEL BARLOW 



FROM AN ENGRAVING BV DURAND 
AFTER THE PORTRAIT BV ROBERT FULTON 



The 

FRIENDLY CLUB 

And 

OTHER PORTRAITS 

By Francis Parsons 



^ Whose yesterdays look backwards 
with a smile.'' 

— Young's Night Thoughts 




Edwin Valentine Mitchell 

Hartford, Connecticut 

1922 



Fioif 



Copyright, 1922, 
By Edwin Valentine Mitchell 

First Edition 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Cl A G y 8 2 4 8 



To 

The Memory of 
My Father 



NOTE 



'T'HE thanks of the author are due to Mr. Charles 
■■■ Hopkins Clark, Editor of "The Hartford Courant," 
in which most of the following essays originally appeared 
anonymously, for permission to republish them in the 
revised, enlarged and sometimes entirely re^written form 
in which they are here presented. "The Friendly Club," 
"The Mystery of the Bell Tavern" and "Our Battle Lau- 
reate" have not been previously printed. 

Citation of authorities, except so far as they appear in 
the text, has been considered inappropriate in the case of 
such informal articles as these. It would be ungracious, 
however, to omit mention of the writer's indebtedness in 
connection with the second essay to Mr. Charles Knowles 
Bolton's "The Elizabeth Whitman Mystery," which is the 
latest and most comprehensive document on this baffling 
incident of New England social history. 

F. P. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

I The Friendly Club 13 

II The Mystery of the Bell Tavern ... 47 

III The Hemans of America 69 

IV Whom the Gods Love 83 

V An Eccentric Visitor 95 

VI Who Was Peter Parley? 107 

VII A Preacher of the Gospel 121 

VIII A Friend of Lincoln 135 

IX Our Battle Laureate 147 

X The Temple of the Muses 161 

XI The Friend of Youth 181 

XII The Christmas Party 191 

XIII The Fabric of a Dream 201 

XIV The Quiet Life 213 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Joel Barlow Frontispiece 

From the engraving by Durand after the portrait by Robert Fulton 

Lexington Monument and Bell Tavern, Danvers 64 

From Barber's "Massachusetts Historical Collections" 

The Sigourney Mansion 75 

From an old woodcut 

Lydia Huntley Sigourney 78 

From a miniature in the Colt Collection by permission of the 
Wadsworth Atheneum 

Inscription to Daniel Wadsworth in J. G. C. 
Brainard's Hand 91 

Title Page of Brainard's "Occasional Pieces 
OF Poetry" 92 

The Watkinson Library 166 

Drawing by Seth Talcott 

Silhouette of Daniel Wadsworth . . . .170 

By permission of The Connecticut Historical Society 



/• The Friendly Club 



/; The Friendly Club 



A HARVARD man, not exempt from the 
complacency sometimes attributed to 
graduates of his university, once observed, 
according to Barrett Wendell, that the group 
of forgotten litterateurs, who toward the close 
of the eighteenth century attained a brief meas^ 
ure of fame as the "Hartford Wits," repre^ 
sents the only considerable literary efflorescence 
of Yale. The remark did not fail to provoke the 
rejoinder, doubtless from a Yale source, that nev^ 
ertheless at the time when the Hartford Wits 
flourished no Harvard man had produced litera" 
ture half so good as theirs. 

How good this literature was considered in its 
day is not readily understood by the modern 
reader, for from the Hudibrastic imitations and 
heroic couplets of these writers, whose brilliance 
was dimmed so long ago, the contemporary flavor 
has long since evaporated. Indeed there is no 

115] 



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modern reader in the general sense. It is only 
the antiquarian, the literary researcher, the cas- 
ual burrower among the shelves of some old li- 
brary who now opens these yellow pages and 
follows for a few moments the stilted lines that 
seem to him a diluted imitation of Pope, Gold- 
smith and Butler. Professor Beers of Yale ven- 
tures the surmise that he may be the only living 
man who has read the whole of Joel Barlow's 
"Columbiad." 

Yet in their time this coterie of poets, who 
gathered in the little Connecticut town after the 
close of the war for independence, became famous 
not only in their own land but abroad, and the 
community where most of them lived and met 
at their "friendly club" — was it at the Black 
Horse Tavern or the ''Bunch of Grapes"? — 
shone in reflected glory as the literary center of 
America. No Boswell was among them to re- 
cord the sparkling epigrams, the jovial give and 
take, the profound "political and philosophical" 
debates of those weekly gatherings. Yet imagi- 
nation loves to linger on the old friendships, the 
patriotic aspirations, the common passion for 
creative art, the wooing of the Muses of an older 
world, thus dimly shadowed forth against the 

[16] 



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background of the raw young country just em- 
barking on its mysterious experiment. 

Do not doubt that these personages whose in- 
dividualities are now so effectually concealed be- 
hind the veil of their sounding and artificial can- 
tos were real young men who cherished their 
dreams and their hopes. One can see them gath- 
ered around the great wood fire in the low ceiled 
room redolent of tobacco, blazing hickory and 
hot Jamaica rum. 

Here is Trumbull, the lawyer, the author of 
"M'Fingal" which everybody has read and which 
has been published in England and honored with 
the criticism of the Quarterly and Edinburgh 
Reviews. He is a little man, rather frail, rather 
nervous, not without impatience, with a ready 
wit that sometimes bites deep. Here is Lemuel 
Hopkins, the physician, whose lank body, long 
nose and prominent eyes are outward manifes- 
tations of his eccentric genius. His presence lends 
a fillip to the gathering for he is an odd fish and 
no one can tell what he will do or say next. 
Threatened all his life with tuberculosis he is 
nevertheless a man of great muscular strength 
and during his days as a soldier he used to aston- 
ish his comrades by his ability to fire a heavy 

[17] 



The Friendly Club 



king's arm, held in one hand at arm's length. 
In his verses he castigates shams and humbugs 
of all kinds, whether the nostrums of medical 
quacks or the irreverent vaporings of General 
Ethan Allen — 

"Lo, Allen, 'scaped from British jails 
His tushes broke by biting nails, 
Appears in hyperborean skies. 
To tell the world the Bible lies." 

Perhaps Colonel David Humphreys, full of war 
stories and anecdotes of his intimacy with Gen^ 
eral Washington, on whose staff he served, is in 
Hartford for the evening. A well dressed, hearty, 
sophisticated traveler and man of the world is 
Colonel Humphreys, who would be recognized at 
first glance as a soldier, though not as a poet. 
Nevertheless he is addicted to the writing of 
verse which is apt to run in the vein of comedy or 
burlesque when it is not earnestly patriotic. To 
look at him one would know that he enjoys a 
good dinner, a good story and a bottle of port. 

We may be sure that Joel Barlow is here, the 
vacillating, visionary Barlow who has tried, or 
is to try his hand at many pursuits besides epic 
poetry — the ministry, the law, bookselling, phi^ 

[18] 



The Friendly Club 



losophy, journalism and diplomacy — but who is 
pre^occupied now, as all his life, with his magnum 
opus, "The Vision of Columbus," later elaborated 
into "The Columbiad." He is a good looking, 
if somewhat self-centered young man, a favorite 
in the days of his New Haven residence with the 
young ladies of that town. Perhaps it was there 
that he first met the charming and talented Eliza- 
beth Whitman, the daughter of the Rev. Dr. 
Elnathan Whitman, sometime pastor of the 
South Congregational Church in Hartford, who 
often visited her friend Betty Stiles, the daugh- 
ter of the president of Yale College. A few of 
Elizabeth Whitman's letters that have survived 
— the packet bearing an endorsement in Barlow's 
handwriting — are evidence that he made her a 
confidante of his literary schemes and hopes and 
welcomed her assistance with his great epic. A 
strong friendship and entire harmony seem to 
have existed between her and Ruth Baldwin of 
New Haven, whom Barlow married during the 
war, and who is said to have "inspired in the 
poet's breast a remarkable passion, one that sur- 
vived all the mutations of a most adventurous 
career, and glowed as fervently at fifty as at 
twenty-five." For nearly a year the marriage 

[19] 



The Friendly Club 



was kept a secret, but parental forgiveness was 
at last secured and Barlow has now brought his 
wife to Hartford where he is continuing his legal 
studies, begun in his college town. But the law 
will not engross him long. Soon, with his friend 
Elisha Babcock, he is to start a new journal, 
"The American Mercury," of which his editor^ 
ship, like all of Barlow's early enterprises, is to 
be brief, though the paper is to continue till 
1830. 

A tall, slender man, Noah Webster by name, 
a class-mate of Barlow at Yale, though four years 
his junior, sits near him, relaxing for the moment 
in the informality of these surroundings his 
strangely intense powers of mental application, 
divided just now between the law and the prep^ 
aration of his ** Grammatical Institute." To the 
"poetical effusions" of his friends he contributes 
nothing, but he was an intimate of them all and 
no doubt often attended their gatherings. 

Perhaps, now and later, something of the poet's 
license in the matter of chronology may be 
granted. Let us assume, then, that young Dr. 
Mason Cogswell is in town for a day or two, 
looking over the ground with a view of settling 
here in the practice of medicine and surgery in 

[20] 



The Friendly Club 



which he is now engaged at Stamford, after his 
training in New York where he served with his 
brother James at the soldiers' hospital. It is 
true that the fragments of his diary, which by 
a fortunate chance were rescued from destruc- 
tion, do not mention any visit to Hartford as 
early as this, though his journal does describe a 
short sojourn here a few years later. Still, his 
presence is by no means impossible. He is a 
companionable youth, as popular with the young 
ladies as Barlow, but with an easier manner, a 
readier humor. Delighted at this opportunity to 
sit for an evening at the feet of the older celebri- 
ties, he is a welcome guest, for already he has a 
reputation for versatility and culture and the 
fact that he was valedictorian of the Yale Class 
of 1780— and its youngest member — is not for- 
gotten. 

Richard Alsop, book-worm, naturalist and lin- 
guist, who is beginning to dip into verse, has 
locked up his book shop for the night and is here. 
Near him sits a man who is, or is soon to be, his 
brother-in-law, a tall, dark youth, Theodore 
Dwight, the brother of the more famous Timo- 
thy, whose pastoral duties detain him at Green- 
field Hill, but who is sometimes numbered as 

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one of this group. Theodore is now studying law, 
but he has a flair for writing and makes an occa^ 
sional adventure into the gazettes. 

These more youthful aspirants have their spurs 
to win. A little later they, with their friend Dr. 
Elihu Smith, who published the first American 
poetic anthology, are to get into print in a vein 
of satirical verse ridiculing the prevalent literary 
affectation and bombast. After journalistic pub^ 
lication these satires will appear in book form 
under the title of "The Echo," in the introduce 
tion to which the anonymous authors state that 
the poems "owed their origin to the accidental 
suggestion of a moment of literary sportiveness." 
"The Echo" was "Printed at the Porcupine Press 
by Pasquin Petronius." 

That particular sportive moment is still in the 
future. Now it is sufficient for these younger men 
to shine in the reflected luster of the established 
luminaries. These greater lights are worthy in- 
deed of the worship of the lesser stars. Three of 
them have achieved, or are soon to acquire, an 
international as well as a national reputation. 
That "M'Fingal" had provoked discussion in 
England has been noted. Humphreys's "Address 
to the Armies of America," written in camp at 

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Peekskill, and dedicated to the Duke de Roche- 
foucault, was issued with an introductory letter 
by the poet's friend, the Marquis de Chastellux, 
in a French translation in Paris, after its publi- 
cation in England where the Monthly and Criti- 
cal Reviews gave it a fair amount of praise, 
though they could not refrain from the statement 
that the poem was "not a very pleasing one to a 
good Englishman." Barlow's "Vision of Colum- 
bus" was published almost simultaneously in 
Hartford and London in 1787. 

In short these men had attained a genuine in- 
tellectual eminence in their generation. They 
were the cognoscenti of their day. Like most 
young intellectuals their gospel concerned itself 
with reform, with the ridicule of shams, with 
the refusal to accept the popularity of new doc- 
trines as a final test of their value. Trumbull and 
Barlow, both Yale graduates, had fought with 
their friend Timothy Dwight their first reform 
campaign which was an effort to introduce into 
the somewhat archaic and outworn body of the 
Yale curriculum the breath of the humanities 
and of modern thought. Trumbull, according to 
Moses Coit Tyler, was an example of a "new 
tone coming into American letters — urbanity, 

[23] 



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perspective, moderation of emphasis, satire, es- 
pecially on its more playful side — that of irony.'* 
Their interests were not only literary. They 
were publicists, political satirists, social philos- 
ophers, not without their religious theories. In 
all these matters their search was for the true 
standards and as champions of causes and enthu- 
siasts of ideals they exhibited a variation from 
type in that their warfare was waged, not against 
the recognized conventions in government, re- 
ligion and society, but in favor of them. Priding 
themselves on untrammelled and direct think- 
ing, their reasoning led them to support the es- 
tablished, the orderly, the stable. Tempera- 
mentally aristocrats, theoretically republicans — 
in the broad sense of the term — they were prac- 
tically federalists. "The Anarchiad," a series of 
poems they were contributing anonymously 
about this time to "The New Haven Gazette,'* 
dealt satirically with the dangers of national un- 
rest and instability, of selfish aggrandizement 
and of a fictitious currency. In these verses Hes- 
per addresses "the Sages and Counsellors at 
Philadelphia" as follows: 

"But know, ye favor'd race, one potent head 

Must rule your States, and strike your foes with dread." 

[24] 



The Friendly Club 



And in the same passage occur some lines, at- 
tributed to Hopkins, that Daniel Webster may 
have read: 

"Through ruined realms the voice of UNION calls; 
On you she calls! Attend the warning cry: 
YE LIVE UNITED, OR DIVIDED, DIE!" 

They ridiculed unsparingly the dangers hidden 
under the cloak of ''Democracy" — dangers immi" 
nent and menacing in the days following the end 
of the war in which most of them had served. In 
fighting these perils they were sagacious in mak- 
ing use of the means frequently employed by ad- 
vocates of radicalism — invective, irony and ridi- 
cule. For these methods secured, as they natur- 
ally would secure if cleverly managed, a wide 
appeal. Yet the efficiency of such weapons de- 
pends very largely upon the occasion. Their po- 
tency is contemporary with the events against 
which they are directed and with the passing 
years their force weakens. Who reads nowadays 
the political diatribes of Swift, the tracts of De- 
foe, or the letters of Junius? Here perhaps is in 
part an explanation of the great temporary in- 
fluence of the Hartford Wits, as well as of their 
complete modem obscuration. The brilliant 

[25 1 



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blade they wielded had a biting edge, but the 
rust of a century and a half has dulled it. 

This general leaning toward the established 
canons, this impatience with the new doctrines 
that in the judgment of these men made for dis- 
union and disaster, should be qualified, at least 
in the religious aspect, in two interesting partic- 
ulars, each contradictory to the other. Hopkins 
began adult life as a sceptic but became a de- 
fender of the Christian philosophy. Barlow, on 
the other hand, deserted in later life the ortho- 
dox ideals of his youth, never, perhaps, very 
enthusiastically championed, and during his 
sojourn in France became a rationalist and free- 
thinker. 

In general, however, the Hartford Wits fought 
for the established order against the forces of 
innovation and disintegration and thus when 
they sat down to unburden their minds of their 
visions of their country's future greatness, or of 
their impatience with demagoguery and political 
short-sightedness, it was natural that their sense 
of tradition and order should lead their thoughts 
to seek expression in the verse forms lifted into 
fame by the masters of an older and greater lit- 
erature and accepted as the conventional vehicle 

[261 



The Friendly Club 



of poetic expression. Here is another reason, if 
they must be catalogued, for the forgetfulness 
of the Hartford Wits. These balanced, formal 
lines, so expressive of the artificial modes and 
manners of the subjects of Queen Anne and her 
successors, are to us prosy, old-fashioned and 
imitative. Their charm has fled. Can you imag- 
ine Miss Amy Lowell reading Hudibras? And 
we must admit that *'M'Fingal," though it has 
given to literature some still remembered aphor- 
isms, such as — 

"No man e'er felt the halter draw 
With good opinion of the law" — 

is, on the whole, poorer reading than its model. 



11 

It is significant that the distinction of the in- 
dividuals united in the "friendly club" was not 
confined to their literary activities. In an age 
sometimes esteemed narrow and limited in its 
cultural aspects they are refreshing in their versa- 
tility. Trumbull was a well-known lawyer and 
served on the bench for eighteen years, part of 
his legal training having been pursued in the of- 

[27] 



The Friendly Club 



fice of John Adams. It was a strange combina" 
tion, not unprecedented but nevertheless ar^ 
resting, of this talent for the law associated with 
the artistic temperament. For with all his prac- 
tical attributes Trumbull was essentially an ar- 
tist. His early poem entitled "An Ode to Sleep," 
says Tyler, "is a composition resonant of noble 
and sweet music and making, if one may say so, 
a nearer approach to genuine poetry than had 
then [1773] been achieved by any living American 
except Freneau." And in the following bit of 
autobiography, quoted by Tyler, may be dis- 
cerned the self-distrust and depression to which 
no soul that longs and strives for the beautiful 
in this imperfect world is entirely a stranger: 
"Formed with the keenest sensibility and the 
most extravagantly romantic feelings ... I 
was born the dupe of imagination. My satirical 
turn was not native. It was produced by the 
keen spirit of critical observation, operating on 
disappointed expectation, and revenging itself on 
real or fancied wrongs." 

This is an extraordinary item of self-revelation 
to come from a man who at various times held 
office as State's Attorney for Hartford County, 
member of the General Assembly and Judge of 

[281 



The Friendly Club 



the Superior and Supreme Courts of his State. 
It may not be an entirely fanciful surmise to at^ 
tribute a partial cause of the delicate health that 
followed Trumbull all his long life to the warring 
elements that strove to unite in his brilliant 
mentality. 

With Dr. Hopkins poetizing was distinctly a 
by-product. His chief concern was the practice 
of medicine and in his profession he won a repu- 
tation that is not entirely forgotten today by 
members of the faculty, for he was probably the 
first American physician to assert that tubercu- 
losis was curable and his success as a specialist 
in this field was so marked that, says Dr. Walter 
R. Steiner in a monograph upon him, "patients 
with this disease came to him for treatment from 
a great distance — one being recorded to have 
made the trip all the way from New Orleans." 
In his treatment he was unique in his day in very 
largely discarding the use of drugs and relying 
more upon pure air, good diet and moderate ex- 
ercise when strength permitted. His theory that 
fresh air was better for colds than the warm air 
of houses was revolutionary, but so was almost 
everything he did — or so it seemed to his con- 
temporaries. At one time he evidently considered 

[29] 



The Friendly Club 



that New York City might offer a wider field of 
practice than the Connecticut capital, for in De^ 
cember, 1789, Trumbull wrote to Oliver Wol^ 
cott, "Dr. Hopkins has an itch of running away 
to New York, but I trust his indolence will pre^ 
vent him. However if you should catch him in 
your city, I desire you to take him up or secure 
him so that we may have him again, for which 
you shall have sixpence reward and all charges." 
In spite of his malady he lived till almost fifty^ 
one, dying in April, 1801, the head of the medical 
profession in Connecticut. 

It is to be noted that though Dr. Cogswell was 
one of the chief contributors to "The Echo" his 
main business in life was as a surgeon rather than 
a poet, and he became one of the most skillful 
surgical practitioners in the country, being the 
first to introduce into the United States the oper^ 
ation for cataracts and the first to tie the carotid 
artery. Closely associated with him is the pa^ 
thetic memory of his daughter Alice who became 
stone deaf in early childhood and whose infirmity 
led to the establishment at Hartford of the first 
school in this country for the education of the 
deaf. Of this institution Dr. Cogswell was one 
of the founders and he was a leader in other 

[30] 



The Friendly Club 



philanthropic enterprises. He lived till 1830. To 
the last he wore the knee breeches and silk stocks 
ings customary in his youth and which he con^ 
sidered the only proper dress for a gentleman. 
His death broke the heart of his daughter Alice, 
to whom he had been a never-failing protection 
and support, and she died within a fortnight 
after her father. 

In contrast with the activites of their col^ 
leagues, the careers of Theodore Dwight and 
Alsop are associated solely with the product of 
their pens. Dwight, however, was more of a pub- 
licist and editor than a creative literary worker. 
He had the brains with which nature had en- 
dowed his family and his history of the unjustly 
maligned Hartford Convention is a thoughtful 
and able piece of work — an original historical 
document that is illuminating and suggestive. 
Such distinction as Alsop attained was strictly 
literary, yet one gets the impression that he 
worked at writing rather as an amateur than a 
professional. He was really a student, a scholar, 
a research worker, and seems to have sought his 
reward more in the pleasure of following his in- 
terests than in the quest of public recognition. 
Much that he wrote was never published. 

[31] 



The Friendly Club 



There was a great deal in life that Colonel 
Humphreys enjoyed besides composing verses and 
a great many activities other than poetry for 
which he may be remembered. Not the least hint 
of any paralyzing self-distrust, no subtle question- 
ings as to whether it was all worth while, dis- 
turbed his equanimity. And fate rewarded his 
zest in life by furnishing him with a variety of 
experiences. They began in the war from which 
he emerged with a reputation for gallantry and 
daring and, what was perhaps more valuable, 
with the firm friendship of George Washington. 
He participated in the raid into Sag Harbor by 
Colonel Meigs in '77 and the next year raided the 
Long Island shore on his own account, burning 
three enemy ships and getting away without the 
loss of a man. It was only a freak of the weather 
that perhaps withheld from him a more glorious 
exploit for on Christmas night, 1780, he headed 
a desperate venture that had for its object no 
less an achievement than the capture of Sir 
Henry Clinton at his headquarters in New York. 
The rising of the wintry northwest gale drove 
the boats of the little group of adventurers away 
from the intended landing near the foot of Broad- 
way and swept them down through the British 

132] 



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shipping in the harbor to Sandy Hook. After 
Yorktown he was ordered by Washington to 
carry the captured colors to Congress which in 
the enthusiasm of the moment voted him a hand^ 
some sword. 

"See Humphreys, glorious from the field retire, 
Sheathe the glad sword and string the sounding lyre," 

wrote Barlow in his "Vision of Columbus." The 
lyre accompanied songs in praise of his country, 
tributes to his commander-in-chief, political sat- 
ires, and even love lyrics — 

"Enough with war my lay has sung 
A softer theme awakes my tongue 

'Tis beauty's force divine; 
Can I resist that air, that grace, 
The charms of motion, figure, face? 
For ev'ry charm is thine." 

But this was by the way. Appointed secretary 
to the commission, consisting of Franklin, John 
Adams and Jefferson, sent to negotiate treaties 
of commerce and amity with European nations, 
he no doubt thoroughly enjoyed his two years in 
London and Paris. In theory the nobility of 
Europe may have been anathema to a patriotic 

[331 



The Friendly Club 



citizen of a republic, but practically there were 
many persons among them whose acquaintance 
was agreeable to an amiable and gallant gentle^ 
man of sensibility like Colonel Humphreys and 
there was, no doubt, a certain gratification in 
dedicating one's poems to a duke and in having 
them reviewed by a marquis who incidentally 
disclosed the fact that he was an old companion 
in arms. Also it was pleasant to be elected a 
fellow of the Royal Society. 

On Colonel Humphreys's return he spent some 
time as a member of the family at Mount Ver- 
non where Washington encouraged him in his 
project of writing a history of the war which, 
however, never got any further in print than a 
memorial of his old general, Putnam. At Mount 
Vernon he wrote an ode celebrating his great and 
good friend whose friendship we may reasonably 
infer constituted one of his chief conversational 
assets : 

"Let others sing his deeds in arms, 
A nation sav'd, and conquest's charms : 

Posterity shall hear, 
'Twas mine, return'd from Europe's courts 
To share his thoughts, partake his sports 

And sooth his partial ear." 

[34] 



The Friendly Club 



It is clear that European life had its attract 
tions for Colonel Humphreys. At all events he 
returned to it, serving as minister to Portugal 
and later to Spain whence he imported his famous 
merino sheep to his acres at Humphreysville, 
now Seymour. Here, and in the adjoining town 
of Derby, he projected and to a creditable extent 
realized, an ideal patriarchal manufacturing and 
farming community, instructing his operatives 
and husbandmen in improved industrial methods, 
in scientific agriculture and stock raising, ath^ 
letics, poetry and the drama in which one of his 
productions was actually presented on the stage. 
At least he accomplished his wish, voiced in his 
poem "On the Industry of the United States of 
America" — 

"Oh, might my guidance from the downs of Spain 
Lead a white flock across the western main, 

Clad in the raiment my merinos yield, 
Like Cincinnatus, fed from my own field: 

There would I pass, with friends, beneath my trees, 
What rests from public life, in letter'd ease." 

iii 
Though the friends grouped around the tavern 

[351 



The Friendly Club 



fire are united in two sympathetic qualities — 
devotion to the Muses and a proud conviction, 
singularly justified by events, of the destiny of 
their country — it is manifest that the member^ 
ship of the little club furnishes only another il- 
lustration of the truism that human personality 
is the most varying thing in the world and that 
life has different lessons for each of us. The most 
baffling individuality of them all, the man whose 
story seems to have been a quest for some mys- 
terious, unattained goal, was Joel Barlow. 

In early life everything he attempted went to 
pieces. His chaplaincy in the army was a tour de 
farce which he dropped as soon as possible. The 
law proved a mistake almost as soon as begun 
and his editorship of ''The American Mercury" 
was abandoned after less than a year. Perhaps it 
was with renewed hope, perhaps it was with 
something of desperation, that he persuaded him- 
self to embark on an entirely new undertaking 
and to accept a proposal to journey overseas to 
procure settlers for the Ohio lands which the 
Scioto Land Company desired to sell to unsus- 
pecting Frenchmen. It is an established fact that 
Barlow was unsuspecting himself, but after he 
had procured the settlers and shipped them off 

[361 



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with golden promises the project turned out to 
be a gigantic fraud. Personal humiliation was 
added to general discouragement. Yet somehow 
he survived the mortification. It may be that at 
this particular time mundane affairs did not seem 
to be of the utmost importance. He was dwelling 
somewhat in the clouds, in a vision — the "Vision 
of Columbus," which he proposed to amplify and 
republish in a form more fitting the great theme 
than the first modest edition of the original poem. 
He was pre^occupied with the millenium he fore- 
saw. 

To the present day reader it is of the highest 
interest to note that the "Vision" foretold the 
Panama Canal, and that the climax of the poem 
is a congress of the nations. 

"Hither the delegated sires ascend, 
And all the cares of every clime attend. 

To give each realm its limits and its laws 
Bid the last breath of dire contention cease, 
And bind all regions in the leagues of peace." 

Indeed with the break-down of his career as a 
promoter the tide began to turn. Barlow's friends 
knew he was innocent of complicity in the land 
swindle. In Paris he found himself at last in an 

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environment where freedom of thought was en^ 
couraged, where the ambitions of a poet were 
regarded with respect and admiration. He was 
always an idealist and he caught the contagion 
in the mental atmosphere of Paris as the revo^ 
lution came on. Perhaps it seemed to him that 
his dream of the millenium was coming true. 
He became a Girondist and a political writer, 
supporting himself mainly by his pen, with the 
re^writing of the "Vision" always in the back of 
his mind. Was this the real Barlow — or was it a 
phase, a manifestation of a kind of philosophic 
idealism, fostered by the air of Paris, so favor^ 
able to the blossoming of this new flower of lib^ 
erty and universal human brotherhood which 
centered on France the minds of all the dreamers 
of the world? 

What did he now think, we wonder, of his 
dedication of the first edition of his epic, pub" 
lished the year before he sailed for France, to 
Louis the Sixteenth whom, as one commentator 
has noted, he soon indirectly assisted in sending 
to the guillotine? He had gone a long way from 
the militant conservatism of the brilliant com^ 
panions of his youth — from the days when he 
had preached the gospel to American soldiers and 

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had collaborated with Timothy Dwight, at the 
request of the General Association of the Con- 
necticut Clergy, in getting out an edition of Isaac 
Watts's metrical versions of the Psalms — to 
which he had added a few poetical renderings 
of his own. 

For the following years his residence alter- 
nated between Paris and London where he found 
congenial souls among the artists and poets who 
were members of the Constitutional Society. His 
"Advice to the Privileged Orders" was attacked 
by Burke, praised by Fox, proscribed by the 
British government and translated into French 
and German. In 1792 he presented to the Na- 
tional Convention of France a treatise on gov- 
ernment which was in fact a remarkable state 
paper, combining profound philosophic theories 
of government with practical administrative and 
executive suggestions. As a result he was made 
a citizen of France — an honor he shared among 
Americans with only Washington and Hamilton. 

Defeat for election as a deputy from Savoy 
and his repugnance to the excesses of the Revo- 
lution appear to have thrown him out of prac- 
tical politics for a time. And then a strange thing 
happened. This visionary poet and idealist at- 

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tempted to retrieve his fortunes in commerce and 
speculation and actually succeeded. During his 
consulship at Algiers, from which he anticipated 
he might never return, he left a letter for his 
wife in which he stated that his estate might 
amount to one hundred and twenty thousand 
dollars if French funds rose to par. 

This appointment came to him in a pleasant 
way. One day in the summer of 1795 he returned 
from a business trip to the Low Countries to find 
an old friend waiting for him. Colonel Hum^ 
phreys, now minister at Lisbon, had arrived at 
the request of the administration to ask Barlow 
to accept this mission to Algiers where for a year 
and a half he was to labor, succeeding in the end 
in liberating imprisoned countrymen and in ef-- 
fecting a treaty that composed troublesome diffi^ 
culties. 

It must have been an interesting reunion. 
Humphreys was too much of a cosmopolitan, too 
generous in spirit, to make Barlow's growing lib^ 
eralism of thought a personal grievance. Here 
for the exiled American was first-hand news of 
the old Connecticut friends — that Trumbull, be^ 
tween ill health and the pressure of public affairs, 
was neglecting the Muses; that Noah Webster 

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was said to be working on a great lexicon; that 
Dr. Cogswell had settled in Hartford and mar- 
ried a daughter of Colonel William Ledyard who 
was killed at Fort Griswold with his own sword 
in the act of surrender; that a play by Dr. Elihu 
Smith had been acted at the John Street Theatre 
in New York; that Timothy Dwight would prob- 
ably succeed Dr. Stiles as President of Yale — and 
much besides. Very likely Humphreys confided 
to his friend his growing interest in Miss Ann 
Bulkley, an English heiress, whom he had met 
in Lisbon and who soon afterward was to become 
his wife, and Barlow no doubt found a sympa- 
thetic listener to his great project of enlarging 
and re-publishing the "Vision." 

His return from Algiers found French consols 
rising with the Napoleonic successes and Barlow 
lived as became a man of wealth and distinction. 
Robert Fulton, who made his home with him, 
painted his portrait in the intervals of experi- 
menting with submarine boats and torpedoes in 
the Seine and the harbor at Brest. Indeed Bar- 
low had now acquired so strong an influence with 
the Directory and the French people that his bi- 
ographer attributes to him the chief part in avert- 

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ing war between France and the United States in 
the tense days after 1798. 

Then followed a return to his own country 
where he had an ambition to found a national 
institution for education and the advancement 
of science. He built a beautiful home, not in 
New England, be it noted, but near Washington 
— the "Holland House of America" — and began, 
but never finished, a history of the United States. 
He did, however, at last complete "The Colum^ 
biad," which was published in Philadelphia in 
1807 — "the finest specimen of book-making ever 
produced in America." 

Did the great moment hold something of dis- 
illusion and disappointment, when, amid the 
somewhat perfunctory adulation, came the bitter 
criticism of the Federalists and the expressed con- 
viction of some of his old Yale and Hartford 
friends that he was an apostate in politics and 
religion? To him it was clear that they did not 
understand. How could it be expected that Tim- 
othy Dwight, for example, the grandson of Jona- 
than Edwards, with all of New England's con- 
servatism and provincialism in his blood, could 
understand? Yet Barlow's ancestral background 
was the same — but who can fathom the depths 

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of personality, or solve the complexity of motive 
and aspiration? 

Perhaps there were times when the returned 
wanderer grew homesick for Paris, At last the 
chance to return to the land that had adopted 
him came — a chance for notable service in an 
honorable capacity. War was again in the air 
and in 1811 Barlow went back to France as min^ 
ister plenipotentiary, charged with the duty of 
again averting conflict and negotiating a treaty 
embodying a settlement of the differences. 

In the French capital he took his old house. 
His old servants came back to him with tears of 
joy. Old friends gathered about him. It was not 
easy, however, to clinch the treaty. The Em^ 
peror was involved in momentous affairs. The 
Russian expedition was on foot. The ministers 
procrastinated. There is an intimation in the 
record that the poet and political theorist was 
out-maneuvered in the negotiations by players 
of a game that had nothing to do with poetry or 
abstract questions but that concerned itself, per- 
sistently and relentlessly, with very definite but 
not entirely obvious purposes. Yet it does not 
seem that this inference is conclusively supported 
by the evidence. However that may be, it was 

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given out that Barlow had secured, and he un^ 
questionably believed that he had secured, an 
agreement as to the provisions of the proposed 
treaty. At any rate the Emperor consented to 
meet the American envoy if he would come to 
Vilna in West Russia. 

So in that dreary winter he set out with a high 
hope of achieving his greatest service to his coun^ 
try, but what would have happened at Vilna we 
shall never know, for on Barlow's approach to 
that town an incredible and stupendous piece of 
news awaited him. The invincible Grand Army 
was retreating, apparently in some demoraliza- 
tion. Everything was in confusion. Where the 
Emperor was, no one knew. Obviously nothing 
could now be done and the American minister 
started to return. 

Somewhere on those frozen roads the Emperor 
passed him, racing for Paris to save his dynasty 
and himself. In the exposure and hardship Bar- 
low fell ill. At the little village of Zarnovich, 
near Cracow, it became evident that he could 
travel no further and there, in the midst of that 
historic cataclysm, he died. 

It was a strange ending for one of the old 
Hartford coterie. In the clairvoyance said some- 

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times to accompany the supreme moment did he 
realize that if his great epic might not live for^ 
ever he had at least given form in his day to a 
dream of which civilization would never let go? 
Did any intimation come to him that his "Ode 
to Hasty Pudding," written off-hand at a Savoys 
ard inn, held more real emotion than all the 
balanced cadences of his monumental work? No 
doubt his delirious fancies sometimes went back 
to the old days. Perhaps he saw once more the 
faces of his old companions of the friendly club, 
not clouded now with misunderstanding or dis- 
approval. From beyond the frosted panes came 
intermittently the confused noises of the great 
retreat, with all their implications of selfish am- 
bition, human suffering and the continual warfare 
of the world. Was his belief in the final triumph 
of the fraternity of mankind shaken by that sin- 
ister monotone? It is idle to conjecture, but let 
us hope that he was comforted by a lingering 
faith, revived in this hour of his extremity from 
the days of his youth, that he would soon learn 
as to the truth of his vision and that he would 
find as well the answers to the other riddles that 
had puzzled him all his life. 



45 



//• The Mystery of the 
Bell Tavern 



//; The Mystery of the "Bell Tavern 



THE investigator of early American fiction 
will find that a peculiar interest attaches 
to two novels, both published in the last decade 
of the eighteenth century, both following Rich- 
ardson in their epistolary form and both founded 
on fact. 

One of these was called "Charlotte Temple, 
or a Tale of Truth." In the graveyard of Trinity 
Church in New York, at the head of Wall Street, 
is a large stone, flush with the ground, bearing 
the name of the heroine of this now forgotten 
story which in its day attained an astonishing 
popularity. The tale is of a young girl who 
during the War of the American Revolution 
eloped from an English school with a British 
officer who abandoned her in New York where 
she died soon after the birth of a daughter. The 
tradition runs that more than a century ago the 
daughter, grown to womanhood, caused her 

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mother's body to be removed to an English 
churchyard, but the stone still marks the first 
resting place and when the writer last saw it 
two wreaths lay upon it. 

In 1797 — seven years after the date of the 
first edition of ' 'Charlotte Temple" — the second 
of our two novels appeared. It was called ' 'The 
Coquette" and was written by Mrs. Hannah 
Foster, the wife of a Brighton, Massachusetts, 
minister. For many years it was read and re-read 
throughout the country, the latest edition 
appearing in 1866. Like "Charlotte Temple" 
its theme was the tragedy of abandonment. It 
seems, indeed, that the writer who wished to 
intrigue the interest of our ancestors of this 
period was compelled to hang his plot on the 
judiciously interwoven threads of sentiment 
and gloom. Perhaps no further proof of this is 
needed than the example of Charles Brockden 
Brown's portentous and sinister romances, with 
their undeniable flashes of genius. But it is 
well to remember, too, that these were the days 
when "The Castle of Otranto," "Clarissa 
Harlowe," and "The Vicar of Wakefield" were 
all popular, and all exhibited varying phases of 
the literary vogue of the day. In other words, 

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The Mystery of the Bell Tavern 

though the prevailing mode of thought found 
expression in different forms, the imaginative 
impulses beneath the various manifestations 
were the same. 

Therefore it is not surprising to find little 
relief from the tragic note in "The Coquette." 
It is true that the author endeavors to present 
the heroine, Eliza Wharton, as a worldly and 
volatile young woman, but these touches of 
lightness have lost with the passing years what- 
ever approaches to polite comedy they may 
have once implied. One must confess that re- 
garded strictly as a piece of fiction the book 
makes rather hard reading today. But exam- 
ined with some knowledge of the mystery upon 
which it is founded, the old novel becomes a 
genuine human document. 

Mrs. Foster was a family connection of Eliza- 
beth Whitman, the original of ' 'Eliza Wharton," 
and may have known her. Whatever the short- 
comings of her portrayal may be, it is clear that 
the authoress was endeavoring to set forth in 
her book the character, as she estimated it, of 
the charming and gifted girl, the tragedy of whose 
death is still unexplained. It is true that the 
accuracy of the portrait in all respects may be 

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doubted. For example, the few letters of Eliza^ 
beth Whitman that have been preserved are far 
more spontaneous and delightful than any of Eliza 
Wharton's epistles which constitute so large a 
part of the story. 

Evidently they are the letters of a different 
person, as well as a more attractive one, than 
Mrs. Foster's heroine. Then, too, Mrs. Foster's 
tale has something of the effect of a tract, of 
a moral effort. She is driving home an ethical 
lesson and Eliza is the example to be shunned, 
whereas modern speculation, grown more toler- 
ant, is apt to question the pre-judgment which 
guided the novelist's pen. He who today seeks 
to penetrate the old secret realizes that he is 
furnished with only half of the evidence. On 
that incomplete data how can a verdict of con- 
demnation be fairly based? Elizabeth's own 
story has never been told. 

Nevertheless, here, for what it is worth, is 
Mrs. Foster's notion, adapted to her fictional 
purposes, of the kind of person the real Eliza- 
beth was, and from this reflection, faint and 
clouded though it may be, of a genuine and 
appealing character, the old novel today gathers 
its greatest interest. For against the somewhat 

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The Mystery of the Bell Tavern 

somber background of her New England period 
this Hartford girl stands forth with a flash of 
brilliancy and charm. In the midst of a some- 
what limited and narrow social life, she was an 
individualist, an exotic. In contrast with her 
Puritan environment she seems almost Hellenic 
— yet one fancies that there is something about 
her more Gallic than Greek. 

She was the eldest of the three daughters of 
the Rev. Elnathan Whitman, D.D., a Fellow 
of Yale College, and pastor from 1732 till his 
death in 1777 of the Second Church in Hartford. 
It is a singular coincidence that through her 
mother, born Abigail Stanley, she traced kin- 
ship to the Charlotte Stanley who was the 
original of ' 'Charlotte Temple." Her father was 
a grandson of that noted divine, Solomon Stod- 
dard of Northampton, who, it will be remem- 
bered, was the grandfather of Jonathan Edwards. 
John Trumbull, the poet and judge, was a cousin 
and so was Aaron Burr. Besides these, the 
Pierreponts, the Whitneys, the Ogdens, the 
Russells, the Wadsworths, were all kin or con- 
nected by marriage. 

Fairly early in life Elizabeth became engaged 
to be married to the Rev. Joseph Howe, a Yale 

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graduate, and for a while a tutor at the college, 
whose chief pastorate was at the New South 
Church in Boston. During the siege he was 
compelled to flee from the city and, his health 
failing, he died at Hartford, probably in 1776. 

In that rare volume, "American Poems, 
Selected and Original," published at Litchfield, 
1793, is "An Ode, Addressed to Miss—. By 
the late Rev. Joseph Howe, of Boston." Its 
occasion was the departure, by sea, of the young 
woman to whom it was addressed. 

"Nor less to heaven did I prefer, 
For thy dear sake, my pious prayer. 

O winds, O waves, agree! 
Winds gently blow, waves softly flow, 
Ship move with care, for thou dost bear 

The better part of me." 

It is possible, indeed probable, that Elizabeth 
Whitman, who visited occasionally in Boston, 
inspired these lines, but it appears that on her 
part this love affair was of only moderate in^ 
tensity and that her father's death, which 
occurred in the year following the death of her 
betrothed, affected her far more than that of 
the young minister she was to have married. 

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The Mystery of the Bell Tavern 

Not long after Mr. Whitman died, while Eliza^ 
beth was visiting in New Haven at the home of 
Dr. Ezra Stiles, President of Yale College, whose 
daughter Betsy was her intimate friend, her 
second love affair developed. 

The Rev. Joseph Buckminster was also a 
Yale graduate and tutor, later settling at 
Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in Dr. Stiles's 
old parish, where his life was spent. He was 
considered an exceptionally brilliant and promise 
ing young man and he seems to have loved and 
wooed Elizabeth ardently. It appears that she 
had a deep affection for him, but also an intense 
dread of the harrowing melancholia from which 
he at times suffered. There is an intimation, 
too, as to her own growing doubts of future 
happiness in the somewhat limited role of a 
New England minister's wife. Would her free 
and eager spirit find satisfaction in a lifetime of 
parochial routine? She was discussing her final 
decision in this matter with her cousin Jeremiah 
Wadsworth in the arbor of her mother's garden 
when Buckminster, who did not like Colonel 
Wadsworth, suddenly appeared and, misunder^ 
standing the situation, went away in great anger. 

Are the following lines from a letter of Eliza^ 
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beth to Joel Barlow, written at Hartford, 
February 19, 1779, references to this affair? 

" .... to find yourself quite out of Ambition's 
way, and in the very bosom of content, — this certainly is 
agreeable, and never more than when one has met with 
trouble in a busier place. I felt myself no longer afraid 
when a certain subject was started. I neither trembled nor 
turned pale, but sat at my ease and felt as if nobody would 
hurt me. I know you will laugh at me for a pusillanimous 
creature for being ever so afraid as you have seen me; but 
I cannot help it ... . 

"As to Mr. Baldwin, if he were at the door, I would 
not run into the cupboard to avoid him. He may mean 
well, in writing all to Buckminster and nothing to me; but 
I do not think it." 

After the encounter in the garden Elizabeth 
wrote Buckminster explaining the matter, and, 
we may infer, telling him that her decision 
would have been unfavorable. His reply was 
the announcement of his approaching marriage, 
but in spite of this rapid volte face he is said to 
have cherished Elizabeth's memory during all 
of his life. Mrs. Dall in her ' 'Romance of the 
Association" tells the story of his burning the 
first copy of 'The Coquette" he read, which 
he found on a parishioner's table. "It ought 
never to have been written," he said, "and shall 

[56] 



The Mystery of the Bell Tavern 

never be read — at least, not in my parish. Bid 
the ladies take notice, wherever I find a copy I 
shall treat it in the same way." 

Familiar letters are always a fairly clear 
indication of character, and it is from these 
letters of Elizabeth Whitman, printed in part 
in her little book by Mrs. Dall, that we may 
obtain our most direct knowledge of her person- 
ality. After reading them one closes the book 
with the conviction that here was a rare and 
lovely woman. Here is wit, orginality, sympathy 
— one is almost tempted to say a certain tender- 
ness — encouragement, good sense and good 
advice. The writer obviously had that quality 
that will forever be wholly captivating to the 
masculine mind — the ability to enter whole- 
heartedly into the aspirations and ambitions of 
a friend, to make them her own, and to supply 
the comforting assurance and admiration that 
the male sex so frequently craves and that is so 
often the spur to high endeavor. There is some- 
thing very winning about this affectionate 
sympathy as displayed in these old letters, all, 
with one exception, written to Joel Barlow at the 
time when he was striving for accomplishment 
and recognition as a poet. Yet the writer's 

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praise is not blind or overdone, for she does not 
hesitate to criticise adversely, though in a most 
engaging way, some of Barlow's verses that he 
sends to her for her comment: 

"There are so many beauties in your elegies, that it 
looks like envy or ill^nature to pass them and dwell upon 
the few faults; but you know that I do not leave them un^ 
noticed or unadmired. If you will have me find fault, I can 
do it in a few instances with the expression. The sentiments 
are everywhere beautiful, just and above all criticism. 
.... Why are you gloomy? You must not be. Expect 
everything, hope everything, and do everything to make 
your circumstances agreeable." 

Perhaps Elizabeth did not feel incompetent 
to assume the role of a critic and literary adviser, 
for she herself had the true artist's desire for 
self-expression and this found relief in her 
own poetry which usually took the form of the 
heroic couplet. 

It is inevitable that the reader of these letters 
should ask himself: Was there anything more 
than friendship between Barlow and Elizabeth? 
Doubtless the answer is in the negative. When 
Elizabeth Whitman first met the poet he was 
engaged to be married to Ruth Baldwin who 
always remained one of Elizabeth's closest 

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The Mystery of the Bell Tavern 

friends and who through all of Barlow's strange 
career was his faithful and beloved wife. Yet 
it is evident that in his correspondent Barlow's 
wavering and self-centered spirit found a steady-- 
ing and assuring solace that he could never have 
forgotten. Is it possible that he knew the secret 
of the final mystery? 

Of love affairs, other than those here indicated, 
that may have transpired in Elizabeth's ex- 
perience before the catastrophe, we know little 
or nothing. No doubt certain emotional adven- 
tures occurred as the years passed. She was 
exceptionally cultivated and entertaining and 
all accounts agree that she was beautiful, though 
her exact type of beauty is a matter of specu- 
lation, for her portrait which for years after her 
death hung in her old home was destroyed in 
1831, when the house was burned — perhaps 
with much memoranda which would have given 
us a clue to her secret. 

The following well-rounded sentence from 
Mrs. Locke's historically inaccurate but emo- 
tionally true preface to the edition of 1866 of 
**The Coquette" is not without its character- 
illuminating quality. "By her exceeding per- 
sonal beauty and accomplishments," wrote Mrs. 

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Locke of Elizabeth, of whose personality she 
seems to have had some reliable evidence, 
* 'added to the wealth of her mind, she attracted 
to her sphere the grave and the gay, the learned 
and the witty, the worshippers of the beautiful, 
with those who reverently bend before all inner 
graces." 

For a young woman of the period her life was 
reasonably varied and her acquaintance ex^ 
tensive. At President Stiles's home, and else^ 
where in New Haven, where she often visited, 
she met many men of distinction. She and 
Betsy Stiles both spoke French fluently and it 
is said that Elizabeth was greatly admired by 
several of the French officers who had known Dr. 
Stiles at Newport and who called upon him from 
time to time at New Haven. Certain, it must be 
confessed rather indefinite, ''foreign secretaries" 
are alleged to have fallen victims to her charms. 

There is an intimation that after her father's 
death she did not always find life at home 
congenial. This is an inference — though not en^ 
tirely an inference — that one may readily accept. 
There was an irony in the fate that placed this 
vivid creature in a New England parsonage in 
the last half of the eighteenth century. Paris 

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The Mystery of the Bell Tavern 

or Florence in the days of the Renaissance — 
in such a setting one can visualize her. But, 
alas! there was little in common between the 
New England of 1780 and the France or Italy 
of three hundred years before. 

And yet one thing was common — as it is 
common wherever individuals of the human 
race abide. When the great passion overwhelm- 
ed her and swept her away from all that she 
had known to a mysterious end, Elizabeth 
Whitman was no longer a young girl. She was 
a woman of experience, knowing the ways of 
her world as well as any one of her day and time. 
The love that broke down all restraints, that 
surrendered everything, that threw the world 
away, was no ordinary affair of the heart. It 
was, in truth, the irresistible, the incredible, 
the historic passion. It was of a piece with the 
substance of which the great dramas of the world 
are made and against the New England scene 
it now became the motif of a tragedy. 

On a day late in May, 1788, Elizabeth took 
the stage at Hartford for Boston where she was 
to visit her friend, Mrs. Henry Hill. No doubt 
her family knew that something was wrong. 
They knew, among other things, that she had 

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spent all the preceding night alone in the star- 
light on the roof of William Lawrence's house 
on the north side of the old State House square. 
It was a strange proceeding, but their daughter 
and sister was, after all, a strange, temperamen- 
tal creature whose impulses and mental processes 
they seldom understood and frequently disap- 
proved. Of how much more they were aware 
we do not know — they must have had their sus- 
picions — but at least they were ignorant of her 
purpose in her journey. From the moment when 
she drove away in the stage neither they nor 
any one of her Hartford friends saw her again 
— nor did she reach her destination. 

On Tuesday, July 29, 1788, the Salem ''Mer- 
cury'* printed the following notice: 

"Last Friday, a female stranger died at the Bell Tavern, 
in Danvers; and on Sunday her remains were decently 
interred. The circumstances relative to this woman are 
such as to excite curiosity, and interest our feelings. She 
was brought to the Bell in a chaise, from Watertown, as 
she said, by a young man whom she had engaged for that 
purpose. After she had alighted, and taken a trunk with 
her into the house, the chaise immediately drove off. She 
remained at this inn till her death, in expectation of the 
arrival of her husband, whom she expected to come for 
her, and appeared anxious at his delay. She was averse to 

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The Mystery of the Bell Tavern 

being interrogated concerning herself or connections; and 
kept much retired to her chamber, employed in needle- 
work, writing, etc. She said, however, that she came from 
Westfield [Wethersfield?], in Connecticut; that her parents 
lived in that state; that she had been married only a few 
months; and that her husband's name was Thomas Walk- 
er, — but always carefully concealed her family name. 
Her linen was all marked E. W. About a fortnight 
before her death, she was brought to bed of a lifeless child. 
When those who attended her apprehended her fate, they 
asked her, whether she did not wish to see her friends. 
She answered, that she was very desirous of seeing them. 
It was proposed that she should send for them; to which 
she objected, hoping in a. short time to be able to go to 
them. From what she said, and from other circumstances, 
it appeared probable to those who attended her, that she 
belonged to some country town in Connecticut: Her con- 
versation, her writings, and her manners, bespoke the ad- 
vantage of a respectable family and good education. Her 
person was agreeable; her deportment, amiable and en- 
gaging; and, though in a state of anxiety, and suspense, 
she preserved a cheerfulness which seemed to be not the 
effect of insensibility, but of a firm and patient temper. 
She was supposed to be about 35 years old. Copies of 
letters, of her writing, dated at Hartford, Springfield, and 
other places, were left among her things. This account is 
given by the family in which she resided; and it is hoped 
that the publication of it will be a means of ascertaining 
her friends of her fate." 

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The hope of the editor of the "Mercury'* was 
realized. This notice, coming to the attention of 
Mrs. Hill, finally resulted in the identification 
of the mysterious lady of the Bell Tavern as 
Elizabeth Whitman. 




Monument and Bill Tavern, Danvers. 

And that, really, is the whole story. The 
succinct newspaper statement, with its con- 
temporary note and its effect of reality, furnishes 
a more eflfective climax than the phrases of any 
modern chronicler. 

Yet one cannot quite close the record without 
mention of a few incidents of the last days. 

The copies of letters mentioned as found among 
Elizabeth's belongings evidently escaped her, for, 

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The Mystery of the Bell Tavern 

fearful of the outcome of her illness, she burned, 
as she supposed, all her papers. A poem and part 
of a letter, both clearly addressed to her lover or 
husband, though no name was given, escaped her. 

"Must I die alone?" she wrote in those final days. 
"Shall I never see you more? I know that you will come, 
but you will come too late: This is, I fear, my last ability. 
Tears fall so, I know not how to write. Why did you leave 
me in so much distress? But I will not reproach you : All 
that was dear I left for you: but do not regret it. — May 
God forgive in both what was amiss: — When I go from 
hence, I will leave you some way to find me; — if I die, will 
you come and drop a tear over my grave?" 

There is a legend, perhaps apocryphal, that 
one afternoon she wrote in chalk on the inn door, 
or on the flagging before it, her initials or other 
sign, which a small boy rubbed out without her 
knowledge. That evening, the legend runs, an 
officer in uniform rode into the town on horse- 
back looking carefully at all the doors and walks, 
but speaking to no one. Not finding what he 
evidently sought, he is said to have ridden des- 
pondently away. 

During all her stay at Danvers, Elizabeth 
wore a wedding ring and at her request it was 
buried with her. 

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As to the identity of the man whom Elizabeth 
loved there have been many speculations. A 
cousin of hers, an able man, distinguished in 
the history of his time, has often been assumed 
to have been the cause of her tragedy, but it is 
fair to his memory to say that he denied this 
assumption vehemently. The late Charles 
Hoadly, State Librarian of Connecticut, had a 
theory that the man was a prominent member 
of the Yale class of 1776, but no evidence for 
this belief is given. Another supposition is that 
Elizabeth, against the wishes of her family, had 
contracted a marriage with a French Romanist 
who, had he acknowledged this union, would 
have forfeited his inheritance. Probably Jere- 
miah Wadsworth, who was her friend and ad- 
viser, knew the secret, but if so it perished with 
him. 

Her brother William, who was eight years 
younger than she, long survived her, dying in 
Hartford on Christmas Day, 1846, at the age 
of eighty-six. In the old man, who was one of 
the last in his city to wear the knee breeches of 
the preceding century, it would have been 
difficult to recognize Elizabeth's "little rogue 
of a brother" whom she frequently commended 

[66] 



The Mystery of the Bell Tavern 

to Joel Barlow's care while at Yale. Through 
a slight knowledge of medicine he acquired the 
title of "Doctor," but he was also admitted to 
the bar and for some time was Town Clerk, and 
Clerk of the City Court. In his later years he 
became something of an antiquary and after 
the Wadsworth Atheneum was built he found 
in that castellated home of the humanities, 
particularly in the library, a grateful refuge from 
the world, where he was always ready to con- 
verse with other visitors upon incidents of days 
long gone by. One subject, however, was uni- 
versally accepted as unapproachable. With his 
son, who died unmarried in Philadelphia in 
1875, the line of the Rev. Elnathan Whitman 
became extinct. 

After Elizabeth's death her brother is not 
known to have mentioned her name outside of 
the family, but for many years he made an 
annual pilgrimage to her grave with his sister 
Abigail. The letter of an old resident tells us 
that after Elizabeth died the door of her room 
in the Whitman home was kept locked and 
nothing disturbed till fire destroyed the building. 



67 



///• The Hemans of America 



///; The Hemans of America 



IN 1866, the year after her death, Timothy 
Dwight, later beloved president of Yale 
University, contributed to ' 'The New England^ 
ler " an article on Mrs. Sigourney in the form of a 
review of her posthumous autobiography, en^ 
titled "Letters of Life." This article deserves 
to be remembered because, for one thing, it 
reflects from its author's mind a sense of humor 
which Mrs. Sigourney never, even in her most 
inspired moments, displayed. 

We all recall the old story of the Hartford 
personage who achieved a certain measure of 
fame by remarking that Mrs. Sigourney's per^ 
sonal obituary poems had added a new terror 
to death. Dr. Dwight's paper begins with a 
reference to this same phase of the poetess. 

"Whenever any person has died in our 
country," he says, "during the last score of 
years, who was of public reputation sufficient to 

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justify it ... a kind of calm and peaceful 
confidence has rested in our minds, that, within a 
brief season, a poetical obituary would appear in 
the public prints from the well-known pen of Mrs. 
Sigourney. Indeed so general has been this con- 
fidence among the people of Connecticut, that 
some persons, who, from peculiar modesty or 
from some other reason, have desired to escape 
the notice of the great world after death, have 
been beset by a kind of perpetual fear that she 
might survive them, and thus, having them at 
a great disadvantage, might send out their 
names unto all the earth." 

And later on in the essay he mentions the 
reported story of the man who was unwilling 
to travel from New Haven to Hartford on the 
same train with the distinguished Hartford 
lady lest in case of a railroad accident she might 
put him into rhyme. 

Though it is doubtful if the author of * The 
Anthology of Spoon River" ever heard of these 
obituary poems, they form a strange precedent 
for that original collection of verse. Some of them 
were gathered by their authoress in a volume en- 
titled ' The Man of Uz, and Other Poems," pub- 
lished at Hartford in 1862, where the literary 

[721 



The Hemans of America 



antiquarian may still peruse them. If they origin 
nally possessed any poetry it is now extinct, and 
the only interest remaining is the personal one. 
To those for whom the older Hartford still has its 
appeal such names as those of Colonel Samuel 
Colt, Samuel Tudor, 'The Brothers Buell," 
Harvey Seymour, D. F. Robinson, Judge Thomas 
S. Willaims, Deacon Normand Smith, Governor 
Joseph Trumbull, and Mary Shipman Deming 
— to mention only a few — have their memories 
and possibly their family associations. 

Perhaps it is not strange that such a consider" 
able part of Mrs. Sigourney's facile effusions 
related to the tomb for hers was the age of 
pensive sentiment. It was the time when the 
weeping willow was popular in all forms of art, 
from the tombstone to the mezzotint illustration, 
when young ladies sang captivatingly, to the 
harp, of an early death, when funeral sermons 
were printed, widely circulated and even read, 
and when everybody was wondering whether 
they were numbered among the "elect" or — 
not. 

Yet it would be a mistake to give the impress 
sion that all the sentiment of the time, or all of 
Mrs. Sigourney's poetry, partook of gloom. Far 

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from it. Though there was, to be sure, a kind 
of background of agreeable melancholy, and 
such alluring titles of her books as ' 'Whisper to 
a Bride" and "Water Drops" (a plea for tem-- 
perance) were doubtless not intentionally humor^ 
ous, Mrs. Sigourney could be playful at times 
and she invariably painted the immediate scene 
in colors of the rose. She was, in fact, an idealist. 
She so far idealized her early surroundings in 
Norwich, where she was born, that Dr. Dwight, 
who also knew Norwich in his boyhood, finds 
difficulty in identifying places and people. She 
even idealized the Park River, sometimes known 
in her day, as in ours, by a less euphonious title, 
alluding to it as ' 'the fair river that girdled the 
domain [her home on what is now known as 
Asylum Hill] from which it was protected by a 
mural parapet." Who other than Mrs. Sigour^ 
ney could have transformed an ordinary stone 
wall into a "mural parapet"? 

Speaking of the Park River, Mrs. Sigourney, 
in the course of describing the pastoral sur^ 
roundings of what was then her country home, 
confesses that she could never understand why 
pigs were unmentionable in polite society — 
though we think she herself refrained from 

[74] 



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referring to them by their ordinary term. * 'Such 
treatment," she asserts "is peculiarly ungrate^ 
ful in a people who allow this scorned creature 
to furnish a large part of their subsistence, to 
swell the gains of commerce and to share with 
the monarch of ocean the honor of lighting the 
evening lamp." 

Here are two other references, quoted by Dr. 
Dwight, to this rural "domain" of which the 
dwelling house, it will be remembered, is still 
standing : 

"Two fair cows, with coats brushed to a 
satin sleekness, ruminated at will, and filled 
large pails with creamy nectar." 

And again, the poultry "munificently gave 
us their eggs, their offspring and themselves." 

But even this idealized Sabine farm was not 
exempt from the troubles that lie in wait for all 
of us, and we must be chivalrous enough to 
admit that Mrs. Sigourney bore the sorrows that 
came to her with grace and dignity. Soon after 
the poetess and her husband took up their resi^ 
dence here Mr. Sigourney was overtaken by 
business troubles, which his wife translates 
into "obstructions in the course of mercantile 
prosperity," and she cheerfully undertook va^ 

[761 



The Hetnans of America 



rious economies, among which was * 'prolonging 
the existence of garments by transmigration." 
Later the family moved to a less pretentious 
home on High street where the latter part of the 
life of Mrs. Sigourney, who survived her husband, 
was spent. 

Later still this house became a kind of shrine, 
and a distinguished Yale teacher and poet, whose 
people, back in his undergraduate days of the 
sixties, dwelt for a time in the poetess's old home, 
has told the writer how nice old ladies from the 
country used to make pilgrimages thither to 
pluck a spray of lilac from the garden where the 
poetess was wont to walk and to see the room 
where she "mused." 

The fact is that she appears to have dwelt in 
a world of the mind that, however real to her, 
was in reality distinctly artificial, like most of 
her poetic writings. In these faded verses there 
now appears to be little real thought, still less 
real poetry. The only stanzas about which any 
flavor of poetic eloquence still clings are those 
entitled 'The Return of Napoleon from St. 
Helena" and "Indian Names." Compare her 
"Niagara" and "The Indian Summer" with the 
poems on the same subjects by J. G. C. Brain- 

[77] 



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ard, another now almost forgotten Hartford 
poet of her time, whose early death prevented 
the flowering of a fame that was just beginning 
to unfold, and the reader grasps at once the 
difference between a certain graceful turn of 
thought and facility of phrase on the one hand, 
and genuine poetic genius on the other. 

And yet in her day she had a prodigious 
vogue and the reference to her as ' The Hemans 
of America," while now holding a certain face^ 
tious implication, was gravely accepted at the 
time. Her journey abroad after her husband's 
death was in its way a sort of mild ovation. She 
met Queen Victoria and it is significant as well 
as amusing to find that our Hartford citizeness 
alluded to the Queen as **a sister woman." Her 
verses were translated into several languages 
and she received presents and letters of com^ 
mendation from the King of Prussia, the Em- 
press of Russia and the Queen of France. 

The explanation of her contemporary popu- 
larity must lie in the state of mind of the period. 
In that era "sensibility" was the passport to 
literary success and Mrs. Sigourney certainly 
possessed sensibility, if nothing else, to a high 
degree. Those sentimental, yearly gift books 

[781 




LYDIA HUNTLEY SIGOURNEY 



FROM A MINIATURE IN THE COLT COLLECTION 
BY PERMISSION OF THE WADSWORTH ATHENEUM 



The Hemans of America 



known as "annuals" were a phenomenon of the 
time, and no "annual" was complete without one 
or more of her poems. It is time that some quali^ 
fied person gave to the world a study of this old 
"annual" literature, so sentimental, so roman^ 
tic, and so generally languishing. The most 
delightful appreciation that comes to mind at 
the moment, of the ' 'annual " as a literary curio 
is contained in Professor Beers's life of Willis 
in the American Men of Letters series — or in his 
essay on Percival in "The Ways of Yale." 

There is a certain pathos in the fact that the 
years have denied this Hartford poetess's gentle 
claim to immortality, because the impossibility 
of granting this claim has led the world to neglect 
two very definite and admirable characteristics 
she possessed. 

One is that she was a remarkably good woman. 
She carried her Christian precepts into her daily 
practice in a way that few of us seem to succeed 
in doing. In spite of a little harmless vanity* 
everyone who came in contact with her appears 
to have admired and loved her. 

In the social life of the old city she was a 
leading and popular figure. Samuel G. Goodrich 
in his "Recollections of a Life Time" describing 

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Hartford in the second decade of the nineteenth 
century says of Mrs. Sigourney, then Miss Hunt- 
ley: "Noiselessly and gracefully she glided into 
our social circle and ere long was its presiding 
genius .... Mingling in the gayeties of our 
social gatherings and in no respect clouding their 
festivity, she led us all toward intellectual pur- 
suits and amusements. We had even a literary 
cotery under her inspiration, its first meetings be- 
ing held at Mr. Wadsworth's." Before the writer 
lie a half dozen of Mrs. Sigourney's letters writ- 
ten in her distinct and regular handwriting. They 
relate to business matters, to social engagements, 
and a few are letters of consolation. Perhaps 
they seem a little stilted and formal, but in all 
the personal notes there is evident a very genuine 
and very charming spirit of sympathy and kind- 
liness. 

The other trait that has been largely forgotten 
is that she was a natural teacher of youth. In 
her early days in Hartford she conducted a school 
for girls on singularly successful and somewhat 
original lines. This she relinquished on her 
marriage, but for nearly half a century those of 
her old pupils who lived never failed to meet 
annually with her in remembrance of their early 

[80] 



The Hemans of America 



association. Clearly, she inspired in them all an 
ardent and lasting affection. 

On the writer's desk, among her letters, lies 
an ancient school copy-book containing the 
transcript of an address she made to her old 
scholars August 17, 1822, **on their meeting to 
form a Charitable and Literary Society." It is 
characteristic that the greater part of this com- 
position is concerned with affectionate and what 
now seem rather pathetic sketches of the five 
young girls of her flock who had died. The 
address confirms what we know from other 
sources — that her school was started in 1814, 
soon after she came from Norwich to Hartford. 

The old manuscript abounds in unimpeach- 
able moral aphorisms. One may, perhaps, 
smile at the carefully balanced phraseology of 
this: "Some sciences are more attractive to 
ambition, more congenial with fame, more omnip- 
otent over wealth, but I know of none so closely 
connected with happiness as the science of doing 
good." Yet most of us would be better men and 
women if we applied that maxim in our lives as 
constantly as did this gentle "lady of old 
years." In her teaching "the science of doing 
good" was not a theoretical matter alone. It 

[81] 



The Friendly Club 



was directed to practical ends. ' 'During a period 
of somewhat less than two years and a half,'* 
she says, "you completed for the poor 160 gar^ 
ments of different descriptions, many of which 
were carefully altered and repaired from your 
own — among them 35 pairs of stockings, knit 
without sacrifice of time during the afternoon 
reading and recitation of history. You likewise 
contributed ten dollars to the Asylum for the 
Deaf and Dumb, five dollars to the schools then 
established among the Cherokees, and distrib- 
uted religious books to an amount exceeding 
ten dollars, among the children of poverty and 
ignorance .... Some of you were accus- 
tomed to gain time for these extra employments 
by rising an hour earlier in the morning." 

Had Mrs. Sigourney continued her school it 
is not by any means preposterous to believe that 
her fame as an educator might have outlasted 
her reputation in literature, and that she might 
have shared with Miss Beecher of the old Hart- 
ford Female Seminary a certain degree of dis- 
tinction in connection with the early education 
of women in this country. 



82] 



IV: Whom the Gods Love 



IV: JVhom the Gods Love 



IN the year 1822 there drifted into the friendly 
social life of the old town a short, odd looking 
young man who, it developed, had come to take 
editorial charge of "The Connecticut Mirror," 
a weekly newspaper, strongly federal in politics, 
which had been established in 1809 by Charles 
Hosmer and which, at this time, had just been 
bought by Messrs. Goodsell and Wells, whose 
place of business was at the corner of Main and 
Asylum streets. 

The name of this young man was John Gardi^ 
ner Calkins Brainard and he was twenty-six 
years old. Those who inquired about him learned 
that he was a native of New London and the son 
of Judge Jeremiah G. Brainard of the Superior 
Court. In 1815 he had been graduated at Yale 
— a classmate of that strange genius James 
Gates Percival, poet, physician, geologist. After 
studying law in his brother's office he had prac- 

[85 1 



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ticed for a time in Middletown, but it was ru^ 
mored that his tastes were literary rather than 
legal, and that the law had not proved very 
successful. 

In spite of his rather uncouth appearance this 
newcomer soon became a favorite among the 
young people. He was clever — any one could see 
that. His frequent witty and amusing sayings 
gathered an arresting emphasis from their con^ 
trast with intervals of quietness and even of 
apparent depression. Perhaps this hint of an un- 
derlying seriousness had its especial charm for 
the young ladies. Remember that in those days 
Byron was in fashion. But there was something 
about this young man that attracted also friends 
of his own sex, ' 'The first time I ever saw him," 
says a writer in the * 'Boston Statesman," 
quoted by Whittier in his memoir of Brainard, ' 'I 
met him in a gay and fashionable circle. He was 
pointed out to me as the poet Brainard — a plain, 
ordinary looking individual, careless in his dress, 
and apparently without the least claim to the 
attention of those who value such advantages (?). 
But there was no person there so much or so 
flatteringly attended to He was evi- 
dently the idol, not only of the poetry-loving 

[861 



Whom the Gods Love 



and gentler sex — but also of the young men who 
were about him " 

We can picture young Mr. Brainard as one of 
the leading figures in that "literary cotery," 
which Goodrich describes and which was pre- 
sided over by Mrs. Sigourney. It was in a room 
adjoining Goodrich's at Ripley's Tavern that 
Brainard soon took up his abode and the two 
became fast friends. 

The discovery was soon made that young Mr. 
Brainard was by way of being a poet — if, 
indeed, the fact was not already known. Verses, 
obviously from his pen, appeared constantly in 
his newspaper. Indeed some of the paper's 
readers may have recognized the new editor's 
hand through their familiarity with the verse he 
had sometimes written for the "Mirror" before 
his official connection with that journal. His first 
contribution to the paper in his new capacity 
appeared in the issue for February 25, 1822, in 
which the change of ownership and the new 
editor were announced. This contribution was in 
the form of a poem ' 'On the Birthday of Wash- 
ington." — ' 'Behold the moss'd cornerstone drop- 
p'd from the wall," ran the first line. It was not 
a great poem, but it sounded a sincere, patriotic 

[871 



The Friendly Club 



note, had a genuine poetic touch and far excelled 
most newspaper verse of the day. 

And so this original young man, with his light 
brown hair, rather pale face, large eyes and 
obvious "temperament" began to acquire the 
character and reputation of a poet. We fancy 
that this reputation was somewhat limited until 
on a sudden impulse he wrote * The Fall of Ni^ 
agara." This piece of blank verse, though now 
largely forgotten in the lapse of years, had in its 
time a tremendous vogue. It was copied far and 
wide, took its place in school readers and for 
years was declaimed by youthful orators before 
committees and admiring parents at school ex^ 
hibitions. 

We do not know the exact date of its composi- 
tion, but it must have been before 1825, for it 
appeared in the author's first collection of verse 
published in that year. It was written one raw 
March evening in an emergency, to make copy 
for the next morning's paper. Goodrich tells 
the story. Brainard was half ill with a cold and 
Goodrich went over with him to the "Mirror" 
office and started a fire in the Franklin stove, 
while his companion, miserable and depressed, 
talked at random, abhorring the compulsion that 

[881 



Whom the Gods Love 



made writing a necessity and his procrastination 
that had postponed his work, till the last moment. 

"Some time passed," says Goodrich, "in similar talk, 
when at last Brainard turned suddenly, took up his pen 
and began to write. I sat apart and left him to his work. 
Some twenty minutes passed, when, with a radiant smile 
on his face, he got up, approached the fire, and, taking the 
candle to light his paper, he read as follows : 

THE FALL OF NIAGARA. 
'The thoughts are strange that crowd into my brain, 
While I look upward to thee. It would seem 
As if God pour'd thee from his 'hollow hand.' 
And hung his bow upon thy awful front; 
And spoke in that loud voice, which seem'd to him 
Who dwelt in Patmos for his Saviour's sake, 
' The sound of many waters ' ; and had bade 
Thy flood to chronicle the ages back. 
And notch his cent'ries in the eternal rocks.' 

"He had hardly done reading when the [printer's] boy 
came. Brainard handed him the lines — on a small scrap 
of rather coarse paper — and told him to come again in half 
an hour. Before this time had elapsed, he had finished, 
and read me the following stanza : 

'Deep calleth unto deep. And what are we. 
That hear the question of that voice sublime? 
Oh, what are all the notes that ever rung 
From war's vain trumpet by thy thundering side? 
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The Friendly Club 



Yea, what is all the riot man can make, 
In his short life, to thy unceasing roar? 
And yet, bold babbler, what art thou to Him 
Who drown'd a world, and heap'd the waters far 
Above its loftiest mountains? — a light wave. 
That breathes and whispers of its Maker's might.' 

"These lines having been furnished, Brainard left his 
office and we returned to Miss Lucy's parlor. He seemed 
utterly unconscious of what he had done .... The 
lines went forth and produced a sensation of delight over 
the whole country." 

It is not too much to say that Niagara brought 
Brainard fame. To the modern ear inured to free 
verse its lines may sound perhaps a trifle over 
sonorous and formal. But it has real poetic 
eloquence and inspiration. Brainard had never 
been within less than five hundred miles of the 
great falls. 

The Niagara is the first poem in that collect 
tion of the poet's verses published in 1825, 
alluded to above. Before the writer at the 
moment lies a copy of this rather rare volume. 
Goodrich arranged for its publication with Bliss 
and White of New York and with difficulty per- 
suaded Brainard to do the necessary work of col- 
lection and revision. It was the only collection 

[901 



IVhom the Gods Love 



of his verses that was published during the poet's 
life. Two others were issued after his death — 
one in 1832, with a memoir by Whittier, and 
one, with a prefatory sketch by the Rev. Dr. 
Robbins, in 1842. The copy of the first collection, 
now on the writer's desk, bears on the fly-leaf 
this inscription in the author's handwriting: 

QpoCC y D"^ A/fi^i<^ /<^ ^ yyf/^ 6^ *^ ^ /^<,« — 

The thin little book has the title, * 'Occasional 
Pieces of Poetry," which is peculiarly appro- 
priate, for most of Brainard's poems were sug- 
gested by incidents of daily life that came to his 
attention. For example, the stage coach from 
Hartford to New Haven falls through a bridge 
and two lives are lost — the occurrence prompts 
him to write the * 'Lines on a Melancholy Acci- 

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dent;" the visit of Lafayette to this country in 
1824 occasions some verses to "the only sur^ 
viving general of the Revolution;" the death 
of two persons who were struck by lightning dur- 
ing a religious service in Montville suggests 
"The Thunder Storm;" the humorous verses 
entitled "The Captain" result from the gen- 
uinely amusing situation that arose in New 
London harbor when the wreck of the Norwich 
Methodist meeting house, that had come down 
the river in a freshet, collided with an anchored 
schooner. 

The fact that the poet took many every-day 
affairs as the immediate occasion for his versi- 
fying accounts for the trivial character of some 
of his work. On the other hand it illustrates the 
theory he held of the need of a genuine American 
literature. Though he read eagerly Byron and 
Scott, he deprecated in the columns of the ' 'Mir- 
ror" the imitation of foreign writers by Ameri- 
can men of letters, holding that our own history, 
traditions and environment gave inspiration 
enough. 

He welcomed the appearance of Cooper with 
enthusiasm, and a story which ran in the * 'Mir- 
ror" under the title of "Letters from Fort 

[921 



OCCASIONAL 



PIECES OF POETRY 



BY JOPIN G. C. BRAINARD. 



Some said, « John, print it j" others said, " Not so ;"— 
Some laid, " It might do good ;" others said, " No."' 

Bunyun's Jpologi, 



NEW-YORK: 

PRINTED FOn E. BLISS AND E. WHITE. 

Cluyton if Van Tforden, Printers, 

]82.'5. 



Whom the Gods Love 



Braddock" and which was largely in the Cooper 
manner was written by him though published 
anonymously. Indeed a great part of his work 
dealt with local matters. ' 'Matchit Moodus " ex- 
presses a fantastic legend of the "Moodus noises. " 
"The Black Fox of Salmon River" embodies in 
verse another grim local tradition. ' 'The Shad 
Spirit "and ' 'Lines to the Connecticut River" are 
other similar examples of his use of the folk-lore 
of the Connecticut valley. 

Professor Beers of Yale cites the exquisite 
little lyric beginning * 'The dead leaves strew the 
forest walk," as about the best example of his 
work. Goodrich says it was written after the 
departure from Hartford of a young lady from 
Savannah to whom the poet had been devoted 
during her visit. Very attractive, too, are the 
lines on "Indian Summer." The blank verse 
entitled "The Invalid on the East End of Long 
Island," has a melancholy note but deserves 
remembrance. It was there that Brainard spent 
the few weeks just before the end. 

He was too sensitive and unaggressive a soul 
both for the law and for the political wrangling 
which attended the newspaper controversies of 
the day. In the practical life of his country and 

[931 



The Friendly Club 



his time, which had small place for artistic 
aspiration or expression, he was an anomaly 
simply because he was a real poet. To this 
situation may be attributed no doubt in large 
measure the sense of failure, unquestionably 
exaggerated, which he often expressed. "Don't 
expect too much of me," he said to Goodrich at 
their first meeting, '*I never succeeded in any^ 
thing yet. I could never draw a mug of cider 
without spilling more than half of it." 

His frequent depression, however, was not all 
temperament — it had a physical basis. In the 
spring of 1827 incipient tuberculosis compelled 
him to give up his work on the ' 'Mirror," and on 
September 26, 1828, a month before his thirty- 
second birthday, he died at his home in New 
London. 

His death called forth the customary poetic 
obituary from his friend Mrs. Sigourney — one of 
the best she ever wrote — voicing a sincere and 
generous appreciation. Whittier, with other 
poets of the day, added his word of memory and 
praise. Perhaps a line from Snelling best ex- 
presses in a few words the whole story — 

"The falchion's temper ate the scabbard through." 



94 



V: An Eccentric Visitor 



V: An Eccentric Visitor 



WE may be permitted to take a certain 
pride in the fact that most strangers who 
sojourn for a time among us express admiration 
and liking for the town. There has been, however, 
one historic and notable exception. A young man 
named Percival who visited us in 1815, the year 
of his graduation from Yale College, did not care 
for Hartford at all and, moreover, did not hesi^ 
tate to proclaim his distaste in some of the verses 
he was then engaged in writing. However, poor 
Percival did not like any spot very well. It is 
with a sense of faint amusement or, when we 
know his history, of compassion, rather than 
with any shade of resentment, that we now read 
the stanzas in which he published his sentiments 
to an unappreciative world: 

"Ismir! Fare thee well forever! 
From thy walls with joy I go, 
Every tie I freely sever, 
Flying from thy den of woe. 

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The Friendly Club 



Ismir! Land of cursed deceivers, 
Where the sons of darkness dwell 
Hope, the cherub's base bereavers, — 
Hateful city! Fare thee well." 

When he wrote this James Gates Percival was 
twenty years old. Some of the emotion of these 
lines arose simply from uncurbed youthful reac^ 
tion from disappointment. Most of it, however, 
was individual and characteristic temperament — 
the same uncomfortable mental constitution that 
seemed to make it impossible for him to with^ 
hold the vitriolic verses he wrote and printed on 
the character of a clergyman who had objected 
to Percival's suit for his daughter's hand. 

The young poet had come to Hartford on the 
invitation of his classmate, Horace Hooker, who 
later entered the ministry and whose wife wrote 
for the young a number of very instructive and 
very pious stories which in their day attained a 
considerable popularity. It was hoped that in the 
literary atmosphere which at that time existed 
in Hartford this odd young man, with his un^ 
doubted poetic strain and his dreamy and con^ 
templative nature, would find a congenial milieu. 

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An Eccentric Visitor 



The visit, however, was a failure. Young 
Percival was not popular. ' 'He was too shy and 
modest," says his biographer, "to adapt him^ 
self to different circles. He wanted confidence, 
and at social gatherings [in Hartford] he talked 
at great length on single subjects, but in so low 
a tone that people could not hear him. He was 
not treated as he expected to be; it seemed to him 
that he was not appreciated, and he came away 
in disgust." 

This charge against us of lack of appreciation 
finds some mitigation in the fact that the poet 
departed from many places in the same frame 
of mind and for the same reason. Percival was 
one of those pathetic spirits who find the world 
an unhappy abiding place. His constitutional 
wretchedness was in fact so extreme that he is 
said in early life to have attempted self-destruc" 
tion and one of his best poems, as well as one of 
the gloomiest in the language, reflects his moods 
at this period under the title of ' 'The Suicide." 

Fortune aggravated the disadvantage of one 
unfitted at the best to cope with the world by 
allotting to him a life of penury. For many years 
he lived as a recluse in the State Hospital Build- 
ing in New Haven where he was allowed the use 

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of three rooms which he never permitted visitors 
to enter — on one occasion even refusing to admit 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It is related 
that at another time a somewhat pompous 
gentleman, accompanied by two ladies, was 
visiting the building and, learning that the poet 
lived there, rapped at his door and then stood 
waiting, a lady on each side of him. The door 
opened a crack and Percival's face appeared. 
"I am extremely happy and rejoiced," began 
the visitor, with a great deal of manner, ' 'that I 
have the honor of addressing the poet Percival 
— " But he got no further, for Percival in^ 
stantly ejaculated "Boo!" and slammed the 
door. This seems to have been his customary 
manner of excusing himself to callers. 

Percival's lack of means was in a way his own 
fault — or at least it was the result of his peculiar 
disposition which, in its sensitiveness to purely 
imaginary slights and its impossibility of conces- 
sion or adaptation, worked constantly against 
his prosperity. His friends were faithful and 
long-suffering and often came to the rescue. In 
spite of his oddities there seems to have been a 
singular charm about the man like the charm of 
an unexpectedly original child. When the bane 

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An Eccentric Visitor 



of an intense bashfulness was removed and he 
was alone with one or two intimates, his talk is 
said to have been delightful. He became abso^ 
lutely absorbed in any topic in which he was in^ 
terested and brought to bear upon it a wealth 
of allusion and comment of which few minds 
were capable. 

As a poet he is now forgotten, yet it is a sug- 
gestive and significant fact that in 1828, when 
a project was in hand to publish a group picture 
of nine living American poets, Percival was to 
occupy the center of the stage, while such minor 
lights as Bryant, Irving and Halleck, with others, 
were to surround him. 

But the fame he longed for and, with an almost 
childlike naivete, claimed as his due, was short- 
lived. It barely touched him and passed him by. 
Yet he deserves remembrance, if only for his 
versatility. While it is chiefly as a poet that 
mention is made of him in encyclopedias and 
other books of reference, he was capable, but for 
his temperamental disabilities, of shining in 
many lines and in one pursuit other than poetry 
he has left a lasting memorial. He studied law, 
was admitted to the bar and never practiced. 
He served his medical apprenticeship under his 

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good friend Dr. Eli Ives of New Haven, took his 
degree, practiced a little and, though he was 
always afterward known as "Doctor," aban- 
doned the profession — except that later in life 
he was post surgeon at Boston till his abhor- 
rence of examining recruits compelled him to 
relinquish the work. At one time he thought of 
entering the ministry and he was always an 
authority on theology and dogma. He gave up 
his appointment as a professor of chemistry at 
the Military Academy at West Point because in 
going to his quarters he had to use the same hall- 
way with other officers. He was a learned botan- 
ist and a linguist of rare attainments. In 1827 
he carried through successfully the immense task 
of correcting the proofs and supervising the pub- 
lication of Webster's unabridged dictionary — and 
seems to have been happier in this work of 
enormous detail than at any other time of his life. 

But it was as a geologist that his most valua- 
ble practical work was done. His "Report on 
the Geology of Connecticut," published in 1842, 
was the result of five years of arduous labor and 
is a sufficient monument for any man. 

"While engaged in this survey," he wrote, 
"I can confidently say that I have been labori- 

[1021 



An Eccentric Visitor 



ous and diligent. While traveling, it was my 
practice to rise early, in the longer days gener^ 
ally at dawn; in the shorter generally I got my 
breakfast and was on my way by daybreak. I 
continued, scarcely with any relaxation, as long 
as I had daylight and then was generally obliged 
to sit up till midnight, not unfrequently till one 
o'clock A. M. in order to complete my notes and 
arrange my specimens. This was continued, not 
only week after week, but month after month, 
almost without cessation." 

Under the law Percival could not be paid till 
his report had been approved by the governor. 
It is characteristic of the whimsical geologist 
that he refused to submit to this approval by 
one whom he considered incompetent to pass 
upon his labors and it was only by the ruse of a 
friend who got possession of the report and pre^ 
sented it to the governor, who at once approved 
it, that Percival secured his pay. 

This work brought Percival a high reputation 
as a geologist. He was engaged by the American 
Mining Company to investigate the lead de^ 
posits in Wisconsin and this in turn resulted in 
his employment by that state to make a geolo^ 
logical survey similar to that of Connecticut. He 

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had made his first report and was engaged upon 
his second when he became ill and in May, 1856, 
he died and was buried in Hazel Green, Wiscon^ 
sin. "Eminent as a Poet," runs his epitaph, 
* 'rarely accomplished as a Linguist, learned and 
acute in Science, a Man without Guile." 

During his employment in Wisconsin his 
friends had bought a lot and built a house for 
him in New Haven. It was a queer structure, 
built after the poet's own plans, with the en^ 
trance at the rear, blind windows at the front, 
and of only one story in height. He was looking 
forward to spending here his last years, close to 
his college, with his few intimate friends, sur^ 
rounded by his books. During an interval in his 
Wisconsin employment he came to New Haven 
to inspect his future home and is said to have 
broken down completely as he was compelled to 
leave by the duty that called him westward. 

He was a strange creature, impossible to get 
along with, handicapped by an over^sensitive^ 
ness that led him into resentments that often 
held the implication of ingratitude, and with a 
constant grudge against the world. He should 
have been endowed and relieved of all the de-- 
tail of life. Even then it is doubtful if he 

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An Eccentric Visitor 



would have produced great poetry, unless he had 
been rigorously trained by some dominant 
master to condense, revise and work over again 
and again his diffuse, sentimental and dreamy 
verses. A few of them retained for a time a cer- 
tain vogue and then gradually passed into ob- 
livion. Perhaps the two that were longest remem- 
bered were "To Seneca Lake" and "The Coral 
Grove." It is an odd thing, but some selections 
from a boyish effort entitled "Seasons of New 
England," hitherto generally cited as evidence 
of his youthful absurdities, would make excel- 
lent examples of the free verse that nowadays is 
taken so seriously. In this respect, at least, he 
was ahead of his time. 

In his review of the "Life and Letters" 
Lowell seems rather dogmatic and intolerant, 
but with his inevitable insight and art of state- 
ment he crystalizes into one sentence the whole 
trouble with Percival. "He appears," writes 
Lowell, "as striking an example as could be 
found of the poetic temperament unballasted 
with those less obvious qualities which make the 
poetic faculty." 

It should be recorded that children loved this 
old bachelor in spite of his eccentricities and that 

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with them he seemed to feel unrestrained and 
free, forgetting the shyness that formed an in- 
superable barrier to ready friendship with adults. 
In our Connecticut history he should not be 
forgotten and if any of the spirits of the departed 
revisit the glimpses of the moon this strange 
apparition ought sometimes to be met, driving 
his phantom buggy through forgotten lanes of 
the state he loved, or with his hammer and bag 
of specimens, climbing on foot the hills and ledges 
he knew so well. 



106] 



VI: Who Was Peter Parley i 



VI: fVho Was Peter Parley? 



IF your great-grandmother were living, dear 
reader, she would be appalled at your igno^ 
ranee in propounding this question. Everybody 
knew the identity of 'Teter Parley," In his 
day his name was as familiar a nom de plume as 
Mark Twain. He was, of course, Samuel G. 
Goodrich. And who — alas for the question! — 
was Samuel G. Goodrich? 

"Ah, pensive scholar, what is fame? 
A fitful tongue of leaping flame; 
A giddy whirlwind's fickle gust, 
That lifts a pinch of mortal dust; 
A few swift years, and who can show 
Which dust was Bill, and which was Joe?" 

He does not deserve to be forgotten. Born 
at Ridgefield, Connecticut, in 1793, he died at 
New York City in 1860. For twenty-four hours 
his body lay in state in St. Bartholomew's Church 
where crowds passed his bier and at Southbury, 

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Connecticut, where he was buried, groups of 
children preceded the coffin and strewed flow^ 
ers in its path. 

It was a fitting and touching ceremony, for 
all his life he had been the friend of children. It 
was almost entirely for them that he wrote his 
two hundred books, of which he estimated, five 
years before his death, that seven million copies 
had then been sold, including, we assume, those 
editions that had been translated into nearly 
every modern language, even Greek and Persian. 

Rummage among the top shelves of any old 
library and you will be pretty sure to discover 
some of these almost forgotten volumes — Par^ 
ley's 'Tales of the Sea," 'Tales About the Sun, 
Moon and Stars," tales about New York, about 
ancient Rome, about Great Britain, about 
animals, about almost everything in this inter^ 
esting world and outside of it. Of his * 'Natural 
History" George Du Maurier says — "Last, but 
not least of our library, was Peter Parley's 
'Natural History,' of which we knew every word 
by heart," and a writer in the ' 'Congregational^ 
ist" a quarter of a century ago ventured the 
opinion, "We have no doubt, were it needed, 
that 1,000 aged people could rise and repeat the 

fllOl 



ff^ho IV as Peter Parley f 



widely famous lines, *The world is round and, 
like a ball, seems swinging in the air.* " 

You will find as a frontispiece for some of these 
well worn books a picture of a kindly old gentle-- 
man in a cocked hat, with a crutch and a gouty 
foot, his pockets bulging with good things for 
children. This was the mythical "Peter Par^ 
ley," and Goodrich tells an amusing story of how, 
during a visit in the South, his host's little grand^ 
son, after cautiously inspecting the visitor who 
had been introduced to him as Peter Parley, took 
his grandfather aside and warned him that the 
guest must be an impostor, for his foot wasn't 
bound up and he didn't walk with a crutch. 

Perhaps in your search on the dusty shelves 
you will be fortunate enough to find a copy of 
Goodrich's verses entitled "The Outcast, and 
Other Poems," printed in 1841, or an odd num^ 
ber of "The Token," an "annual," which 
Goodrich published from 1828 till 1842 and in 
which were first given to the world some of the 
early productions of such young literary sparks 
as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes 
and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 

During the course of an eventful life Goodrich 
came into relations more or less intimate with 

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many famous people. A few of them, beside 
those just mentioned, were Daniel Webster (who 
had a great admiration for his writings), James 
Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Whittier, 
Jeffery, founder and editor of the Edinburgh 
Review, Sir Walter Scott and Lockhart his son^ 
in-law and biographer. Goodrich was an eye- 
witness in Paris of the Revolution of '48 and he 
draws a vivid portrait of the third Napoleon on 
the eve of the Coup d'Etat. His daughter tells 
of an informal celebration in Florence, planned 
in his honor by Charles Lever, at which there 
were present the Brownings, the Tennysons, (she 
liked Frederic the best) the Storys, Gibson 
and Powers the sculptors, Lowell, Lamartine, 
Longfellow, Trollope, Buchanan Read and others 
— surely a brilliant company of which to be the 
center. 

In London he was present at the ceremonies 
attendant upon the return of Byron's body from 
Greece. He heard Clay, Calhoun, John Ran- 
dolph and other celebrities of the day speak in 
the Senate. He was a guest at levees at the 
White House and gives a dramatic account of a 
meeting there between Jackson and John Quincy 
Adams on the night of the former's defeat for 

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PFho Was Peter Parley? 



the presidency by the latter. He saw John Mar^ 
shall presiding over the Supreme Court. He 
presents a minute description of President 
Monroe whom he encountered both at Washing" 
ton and also at Hartford during a ceremony at 
the School for the Deaf, and whose personal 
appearance he thought far from prepossessing. 
In fact, there are few persons who attained dis" 
tinction during the first half of the nineteenth 
century of whom the reader will not find an en^ 
tertaining and graphic sketch in Goodrich's 
"Recollections of a Life Time." 

It is a book well worth reading for not only 
is it written in an amusing and racy style and 
enlivened by anecdote and delightful comment, 
but it is a historic review of the politics, literal 
ture, international relations and social life of the 
time, put together by a writer eminently quali" 
fied for the task. We are chiefly concerned, how-- 
ever, with Goodrich's picture of life in the old 
town a century ago. 

He came here as a youth of seventeen in 1811 
and Hartford was his home, though he was fre^ 
quently absent in Europe and elsewhere, till 
1826 when he moved to Boston. 

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The city when he arrived was, he says, **a 
small commercial town, of four thousand inhabit 
tants, dealing in lumber and smelling of molas^ 
ses and Old Jamaica — for it had still some trade 

with the West Indies There was a high 

tone of general intelligence and social respecta- 
bility about the place, but it had not a single 
institution, a single monument that marked it 
as even a provincial metropolis of taste, in litera- 
ture, art, or refinement." In this latter respect 
things were changed before he left. Trinity 
(then Washington) College, the American School 
for the Deaf, the Retreat for the Insane and other 
philanthropic and educational institutions were 
established during his residence in the provincial 
capital. 

On his arrival he worked as a clerk in a dry 
goods store and his intimate friend was George 
Sheldon, "favored clerk" in the "ancient and 
honored firm" of Hudson & Goodwin, publishers 
of the "Connecticut Courant," Webster's 
Spelling Book, and much besides. Mr. Goodwin, 
of this firm, he describes as ' 'a large, hale, comely 
old gentleman, of lively mind and cheerful man- 
ners. There was always sunshine in his bosom 
and wit upon his lip. He turned his hand to vari- 

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fi^ho Was Peter Parley? 



ous things, though chiefly to the newspaper, 
which was his pet. His heaven was the upper 
loft in the composition room; setting type had 
for him the sedative charms of knitting work to 
a country dame." 

At the home of his uncle, Senator Chauncey 
Goodrich, he met all the prominent members of 
the famous "Hartford Convention," which 
finds in him a vigorous defender against the 
charge of unpatriotism. 

During the War of 1812 he served at New 
London as a member of a Hartford artillery 
battery, a sort of corps d'elite, under the com- 
mand of Captain Nathan Johnson, a well known 
lawyer who afterward became general of militia. 
Though he was for a few brief moments under 
the bombardment of the British ships that were 
blockading Decatur, Biddle and Jones in the 
Thames, his service was bloodless and he nar- 
rates it with humor and gusto. 

He began his career as a publisher in partner- 
ship with Sheldon whose early death terminated 
that enterprise. Goodrich himself, however, 
here published by subscription the poems of 
John Trumbull, whom he knew well, eight 
volumes of the Waverly novels, then arousing 

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intense interest, and several school books and 
"toy books," as he calls them, for children. He 
was a leading member of a literary club which 
included Bishop J. M. Wainwright, Isaac 
Toucey, William M. Stone, Jonathan Law and 
S. H. Huntington. 

Another literary "cotery," of which Mrs. 
Sigourney was the presiding genius, met gen^ 
erally at Daniel Wadsworth's home. Some of 
the poems and papers read at the first of these 
clubs were published by Goodrich in a short' 
lived periodical called "The Round Table." 

We find gossipy sketches of Jeremiah Wads^ 
worth. Dr. Cogswell and his deaf and dumb 
daughter Alice, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, 
Theodore Dwight, the poets Brainard and 
Percival, Dr. Strong, pastor of the "Middle 
Brick" (the Center) Church, Colonel John 
Trumbull, the artist and his beautiful wife, who 
was supposed to be the daughter of an English 
earl but about whose lineage there was an im^ 
penetrable mystery. Many others of the old 
Hartford characters live again in these pages 
which furnish us what is doubtless a very accu^ 
rate, as well as a very charming impression of the 
social life of the old town one hundred years ago. 

[116] 



ff^ho Was Peter Parley? 



But the great world called the future "Peter 
Parley" and his ambitions and love of variety 
drew him away from the place of his earliest 
literary experience to foreign residence and travel 
and to the little brown house that he afterward 
built at Jamaica Plain. Later in life he returned 
again to Europe and for two years was American 
Consul at Paris. 

He had his failures as well as his successes, his 
days of financial losses, as well as of affluence. 
He experienced, too, his periods of feeble health. 
But he possessed the courage that ancestry like 
his often seems to breed and one cannot fail to 
accord a hearty tribute to the resolution with 
which, in an impaired physical condition, he set 
himself, like Mr. Clemens, to overcome adver^ 
sity with hard work, with his pen. 

His Parley books were the outgrowth of two 
impulses or characteristics — his innate love of 
children and his personal rebellion on the one 
hand against the dull school books of his boy- 
hood and on the other against what he considered 
such ridiculous and deleterious old fairy stories 
as "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Jack the 
Giant Killer." He did not think the climax of 
"Little Red Riding Hood" was healthy reading 

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for children and he did not at all approve of Jack 
the Giant Killer's morals. In his opinion there 
was no particular sense in the Mother Goose 
jingles. 

And so he tried to give children, in the guise 
of perfectly proper but at the same time interest^ 
ing stories and verses, the information and a 
good deal of the education they required. He 
may have carried his theory to some extremes, 
but he was one of the first among us to realize 
that with children effective educational methods 
must take into consideration the securing at the 
outset of interest and attention. 

What extraordinary success he achieved has 
already been intimated. Yet it is pathetic to note 
that he himself was the first to acknowl^ 
edge the fact that his fame would be temporary. 
* *I have written too much," he says at the height 
of his reputation, * 'and have done nothing really 
well. You need not whisper it to the public, at 
least until I am gone; but I know, better than 
anyone can tell me, that there is nothing in this 
long catalogue [of his books] that will give me a 
permanent place in literature." 

Yet it is safe to say that as long as the human 
mind loves to dip into the past and to re-create 

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tFho JVas Peter Parley? 



in familiar surroundings the scenes and people 
of long ago his "Recollections of a Life Time" 
will have its readers. And many of us would 
cheerfully relinquish any hope of immortal mem- 
ory could we be assured of the love of the count- 
less children to whom "Peter Parley" was a 
dear friend and companion. 



[119 



FII: A Preacher of the Gospel 



FII: A Preacher of the Gospel 



IT is not often claimed that the small city or 
country town produces proportionately more 
of the human phenomena popularly denominated 
* 'characters " than does the larger municipality. 
Whether this is indeed a fact, or whether the 
truth is that in the small group variations from 
type are more conspicuous, is perhaps imma^ 
terial. At all events the memories and traditions 
of pronounced personalities seem to be frequently 
associated with the less populous communities, 
especially in New England. 

In any review of the personages that lived in 
the capital of Connecticut in the last century 
the individuality of one of the life-long pastors 
of its oldest church stands forth as a shining 
example of the capricious and at the same time 
engaging forms in which humanity may be 
clothed. Above all else the Rev. Doctor Joel 
Hawes was a * 'character.'* 

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To begin with, his personal appearance was 
sufficiently extraordinary. Tall, gaunt, awk- 
ward, with large hands and feet, he would have 
attracted attention — and did attract attention 
— anywhere. His face was homely and in repose 
unprepossessing, but when he became interested 
in talk his expression gathered from the play of 
thought an animation which caused his listeners 
to forget the essential unattractiveness of his 
features. 

In many respects there was something Lin- 
coln-like about him, though he lacked the fine 
eyes, the wistful, haunting look, that distinguish 
the later portraits of his great contemporary. 
Like Lincoln, too, he came from the common 
stock and was trained in a rough school. The 
story of his tacking loose leaves from the Bible 
on the walls of the store, where in his youth he 
worked, and memorizing verses between visits 
of customers recalls somewhat similar methods 
of self-education employed by the boy who be- 
came president. With no money, with no friends 
except of his own making, with no "advantages" 
or * 'background," with not even a fair start, he 
early developed a tremendous courage and de- 
termination; when to this was added a sense 

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A Preacher of the Gospel 



that the hand of God was upon him nothing could 
stop him. That in his day he should become one of 
the foremost divines in the country was inevitable. 

It was his earnestness and force that made him 
what he was and not, it must be confessed, any 
outstanding brilliancy of mind. His fellow^ 
citizen, Doctor Bushnell, far excelled him in 
mental power, in breadth and orginality of 
thought, in versatility and imagination. In 
Horace Bushnell was always something of the 
poet, much of the mystic. His books are bought 
today and his name remembered, while Dr. 
Hawes, except in his old church and city, is for^ 
gotten. Yet it is to be doubted whether, con^ 
sidering Joel Hawes's early difficulties and his 
moderate mental equipment, one could find a 
better example than his life furnished of what 
may be accomplished by a man who cherishes a 
conviction of personal destiny. He became as^ 
sured that God intended him to preach the gos- 
pel and he proceeded to do just exactly that with 
confidence, single-mindedness and consequent 
success during a long life. His last sermon was 
delivered three days before his death. 

Here is his theory of the preacher's mission: 
* Truth, God's truth especially, is eternally, and 

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must be, interesting to the mind of man; and, if 
I can succeed in getting that truth before the 
minds of my people, I shall not fail to interest 
and instruct all classes of them, be their cultiva^ 
tion and tastes and habits ever so dissimilar. 
This, then, shall be the great, leading object of 
my preaching : I will get as much of God's truth 
into my sermons as I can" .... 

Might not this principle be adopted to advan^ 
tage by many a modern clergyman? 

It was in a rough-shod manner, regardless of 
obstacles, that Doctor Hawes plowed his way 
through life. He did not know how to compro- 
mise. Tact, adaptability, adjustment, finesse, 
— these words were not included in his vocab- 
ulary. He paid little attention to the amenities 
of existence, but went directly to his object, 
as on the occasion when in prayer meeting, after 
lamenting the fact that ordinarily only a few 
persons took active part in these gatherings, he 
suddenly called upon one diffident attendant, 
whose voice had never been heard, with the 
peremptory request,* 'Brother Jones, will you lead 
us in prayer — and we won't take any excuse." 

He spoke the plain truth as he saw it, regard- 
less of whether it was appropriate, or sometimes 

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A Preacher of the Gospel 



whether it hurt. A distinguished lawyer, no 
longer living, once told the writer that when he 
was a small boy the doctor met him one day in 
the street, stopped him, put his hand on his head, 
and, after gazing intently at him for so long that 
the child became rather frightened, at last ejacu^ 
lated, ' 'Charles, you remind me so much of your 
grandfather — he was a hard-featur'd man!" 

This absolute sincerity, this disdain of any 
pretense or artificiality, this almost childlike 
na'ivete, while they furnished many amusing 
and sometimes embarrassing incidents, had no 
small part in endearing the good man in the 
hearts of his people. Indeed the significant thing 
about the numerous anecdotes of him that are 
still occasionally quoted is that while so many of 
them turn on his peculiarities and eccentricities, 
none of them seems to detract from the affection 
and esteem in which the man and his memory are 
held in the traditions of his church. Doubtless 
the reason is that these stories essentially serve 
to delineate and illumine the portrait of an 
intensely earnest, able and vigorous servant of 
God and his fellow men. 

His humor was not all unconscious. He had 
his own notions of the incongruous and diverting. 

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On one of his journeys abroad he wrote of the 
tombs in Westminster Abby — "There lie in 
promiscuous assemblage kings, queens, states- 
men, warriors, poets, scholars, prostitutes, and 
villains, each, by his epitaph, now in heaven, but 
all awaiting the decisions of the last day, which, 
in a great majority of cases, will, it cannot be 
doubted, reverse forever the judgment of man." 

There was, too, another side to him. Hidden 
in the uncouth body was a kindly and sympa- 
thetic heart. Children, at first awed and possibly 
repelled by his appearance and manners, soon 
grew to love him. His biographer quotes him as 
saying that he could never go past a hand-organ 
in the street without stopping to listen with the 
children and see the monkey. 

Sorrow and suffering found in him an instant 
response and the instinctive impulse to comfort 
and help. Generally these traits, while partly 
inherent, are emphasized and made of value to 
others, as well as to one's self, by experience. 
Doctor Hawes's life had its tragic sorrows and 
these were translated into a singular ability to 
comfort and help. Then, too, while he would 
never compromise for an instant with tempta- 
tion, weakness and sin, he could understand. 

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A Preacher of the Gospel 



As in the case of most forceful, passionate natures, 
his early days, before he discovered the Bible, 
had their period of wildness, brief though it was. 
In the practical conduct of life he was no the- 
orist, no amateur. He had struggled against pov- 
erty and loneliness, as he had fought and con- 
quered the devil in his own life, and he recog- 
nized his old adversary and knew how to deal 
with him when he saw the fight going on in the 
experience of others. 

Perhaps it was all this as much as anything 
that constituted the foundation for his interest 
in the youth of his church and city. In 1827 
this interest resulted in a series of ' 'Lectures to 
Young Men" delivered on successive Sunday 
evenings to crowded and enthusiastic assemblies 
in his own church, and later repeated at Yale 
College where subsequently he became a member 
of the corporation. The following year the lec- 
tures were published "at the united request" of 
his hearers and instantly became famous. ' 'Few 
books," says Doctor Walker in his history of the 
First Church, "attained a like circulation." 
Nearly a hundred thousand copies, in various 
editions, were issued in this country and more in 
Great Britain. One Scotch publisher alone, as- 

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serts Doctor Walker, printed fifty thousand 
copies. 

Reading these lectures today, nearly a century 
after their composition, one is impressed by the 
fact that here is a compendium, as valuable now 
as at the time of delivery, of practical rules for a 
good and useful life. The titles of the five original 
addresses indicate the subject matter — ' 'Claims 
of Society on Young Men;" ''Dangers of Young 
Men;" "Importance of Established Principles;" 
"Formation and Importance of Character;" 
"Religion the Chief Concern." 

The lectures deal with plain, fundamental 
truths, in a straightforward business-like way. 
There is as little ornament as imagination about 
them; they have more vigor than originality, 
but they are bristling with common sense and 
set forth with tremendous earnestness the prin- 
ciples of a practical Christian philosopher. 
Epigrammatic touches, indeed, are not wanting. 

* 'A lover of good books," says the lecturer, ' 'can 
never be in want of good society;" and again, 

* 'He who cares not for others will soon find that 
others will not care for him." ' 'The Gospel may 
be neglected," he asserts, ' 'but it cannot be un- 
derstandingly disbelieved." ' 'Character is power; 

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character is influence," he says, "and he who has 
character, though he may have nothing else, has 
the means of being eminently useful, not only to 
his immediate friends, but to society, to the 
church of God, and to the world." 

Today the mind of youth is questioning. It is 
seeking not only rules for the conduct of life but 
a rational interpretation of religious creed and 
aspiration that will prove a guide in explorations 
on ground that perhaps Doctor Hawes would 
have considered forbidden. He was not a meta" 
physician. To him the way was plain. The fun- 
damental truths, the orthodox acceptances, 
were good enough for him. The questions that 
for long troubled Doctor Bushnell not only did 
not worry Doctor Hawes — he did not under- 
stand why one should ask them. Doctor Bush- 
nell was ahead of his time. He began where 
Doctor Hawes left off, and soon about the 
younger man gathered a school of disciples who 
shared in sympathy, if not with equality of in- 
tellectual penetration, the tenets of the religious 
philosopher, the visions of the seer and poet. 

It was inevitable that two such divergent 
personalities as Hawes and Bushnell, laborers 
in the same field, living in the same city, should 

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come into conflict. The story of that famous 
difference, of the struggles to find common 
ground and of the final reconciliation, have today 
a note of pathos. For the lay reader it is not easy 
at first glance to see what it is all about, and yet 
what feeling and bitterness were aroused ! 

There is no space here to go into the details of 
that old dispute. The letters the two ministers 
exchanged, like all sincere letters, are typical of 
their respective characters and a memorialist of 
Doctor Hawes finds nothing for which to apolo" 
gize in his side of the correspondence. His letters, 
indeed, evidence what a modern theologian 
might consider his speculative limitations, but 
they show, too, beneath his determination to 
adhere to his principles, a genuine grief at the 
separation and a hope that the two churches 
might be * 'rooted and grounded in the truth, and 
their pastors as happily united in fellowship and 
love." 

The church of which Doctor Hawes was minis^ 
ter was, and still is, something more than an 
ecclesiastical organization. It is a civic institu^ 
tion. It founded the town. Its minister takes 
rank as a public personage. In this character 
Dr. Hawes was interested in many local activities. 

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An example of this was his connection with the 
famous Hartford Female Seminary — and this 
may serve also as another illustration of his inter- 
est in young people. On the Seminary's organiza- 
tion he was chosen a trustee — an office he held till 
his death. For many years he was its president. 
At the reunion of its graduates in 1892, a speaker 
who had been one of his "boys," and who was 
the executor of his will, gave a little address on 
his old pastor which is one of the best portraits 
of him that remains. 

"... the Hartford Female Seminary," said 
this speaker, "was his especial delight. To its 
principals he was a devoted friend; its teachers 
were his proteges and assistants; the pupils his 
spiritual garden. It was to him the nursery of 
all that was best in womanhood. I do not know 
how his sober judgment would have ranked, in 
relative importance, Yale College, the A. B. C. 
F. M., and the Seminary; but I know that in his 
affection this school had the warmest place. 
How regularly on Monday morning he opened 
its sessions with fervent prayer; how benignantly 
his benediction fell on the school as he took his 
departure, you all know who were in attendance 
in his time. And although you may have smiled 

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at his peculiarities, I do not believe a doubt ever 
crossed one of your minds that Joel Hawes was 
a loving, faithful friend, and truly a man of God." 



134] 



VIII: A Friend of Lincoln 



VIII: A Friend of Lincoln 



IN the Spring of 1869 Gideon Welles, who had 
been appointed Secretary of the Navy by 
Lincoln and had served to the end of the John" 
son administration, returned to Hartford where 
he lived till his death in 1878. His diary for May 
2, 1869, contains the following entry: 

"We left New York at 3 p. m. and reached Hartford at 
seven, stopping at the Allyn House. Nearly four years 
have passed since I have been here, more than eight since 
I left and took up my residence in Washington . . . 
Hartford itself has greatly altered — I might say improved 
— for it has been beautified and adorned by many magnifi^ 
cent buildings, and the population has increased. These 
I see and appreciate; but I feel more sensibly than these, 
other changes which come home to my heart. A new and 
different people seem to move in the streets. Few, com- 
paratively, are known to me. A new generation which 
knows not Joseph is here." 

Perhaps it was natural that the retiring secre^ 
tary of the navy, returning quietly and unan^ 

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nounced, and with possibly a trace of the de- 
pression that comes with the relinquishment of 
great affairs, should fancy a certain lack of en- 
thusisam in his welcome. But a little later, when 
he had bought the house, now No. 1 1 Charter 
Oak Place, which was to be his future home, and 
his presence was more widely known, he found 
his friends more appreciative. 

"During the week," he writes some days later, "old 
friends have called and welcomed me back .... My 
old friend, Calvin Day, was absent from the city when I 
arrived and did not get home till midnight on Saturday. 
As soon as he knew I was here, on Monday morning, he 
called. H. A. Perkins, Mrs. Colt, Beach, Seymour, etc., 
etc., called. Mark Howard is absent. Governor Hawley 
saw me at breakfast on Wednesday last and immediately 
came and greeted me." 

It is not without interest to note that the 
servant question was at the time a great problem. 
This, and the confusion of getting settled, of 
unpacking loads of furniture, of arranging the 
contents of two hundred and twenty-four boxes 
that arrived from Washington, while Mrs. 
Welles was confined to her room as the result of 
a fall, "have made me," he writes, "unused as I 
am to these matters, exceedingly uncomfort- 

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able." Nevertheless, there is some mitigation, 
as this entry shows: 

"Met Mr. Hamersley — who invited me to his store, 
where we had an hour, on political subjects chiefly. It is 
somewhere about fifteen years since we have had such and 
so long a conversation. So far as I have met and seen old 
friends, I have had every reason to be satisfied. Though 
not very demonstrative or forward in calling, they have 
without exception been cordial and apparently sincere." 

During the nine remaining years of his life 
Mr. Welles lived quietly, devoting most of his 
time to writing, his chief pieces of work being an 
elaborate article claiming for the navy, which he 
felt had never received its proper share of the 
credit, the most important part in the capture 
of New Orleans, and a little volume entitled 
"Lincoln and Seward." 

The career which he looked back upon in these 
last years was one which should have brought to 
any man the satisfactions that come from im^ 
portant work well done. There were, of course, 
elements that would naturally interfere with such 
satisfactions — and these a man like Gideon 
Welles took to heart more seriously than another 
might have done. No one could have served as 
he did in high administration during those eight 

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eventful years without a sense of the blunder^ 
ing, the waste, the cross^purposes, the petty 
motives, and even the treachery that were ex^ 
hibited in such a disheartening fashion to those 
behind the scenes. But through all this he pur- 
sued steadfastly his honest and able way, not 
exempt from bitter criticism, like all his col- 
leagues, nor from spiteful intrigue. He seems 
such a unique and stalwart figure that one is led 
to inquire, as one reads his history and his per- 
sonal record, why he was not more famous in his 
day and time. 

Perhaps one reason is that while he had a 
remarkable gift of common sense, he lacked a 
sense of humor and the sense of proportion that 
accompanies it. His diary, it is quite true, is at 
times what one would call humorous reading, 
but the humor is either unconscious or partakes 
of sarcasm. He took life pretty seriously — and 
indeed he had occasion to do so. 

Then one infers another characteristic which 
is so difficult to define and in its way so subtle 
that one hesitates to be dogmatic about it. Yet 
reading between the lines of the diary, which is 
one of the frankest human documents in the 
world, one reader at least gains the impression 

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that the author, perhaps realizing the innate 
tendency, which the diary shows, to pronounce 
judgment, felt before the world the necessity 
of putting a curb upon this propensity. In pub" 
lie he never seems to have asserted himself in 
the Rooseveltian manner. He had decided 
opinions of his own and was altogether an inde- 
pendent, fearless person, but he appears to have 
been one of the rather reticent members of the 
cabinet. A friend tells him on one occasion that 
he should have been more forward in expressing 
his views and the diary has many references to 
times when he judged silence the better course 
— as very likely it was — for with him silence 
never went so far as to constitute consent to any- 
thing he disapproved. Far more single-minded 
and straightforward than some of the other cabi- 
net ministers, he apparently lacked the art, which 
many men of smaller caliber possessed, of getting 
his personality in a large way before the country. 
One feels that here was a capable and high- 
minded public servant, with many qualities 
which in another personality would have pro- 
duced a great leader of men. But there was al- 
ways this reticence. Was it possibly the in- 
heritance of a New England ancestry? 

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However, if in his life^time Gideon Welles 
lacked the gift for individual prominence that 
with some of his contemporaries seemed to be 
the main object of life, the publication of his 
remarkable * 'Diary" has, long after his death, 
immortalized him. In this journal we have both 
a revelation of personal character that is illumin^ 
ating and a historic document that is invaluable. 

It is fortunate for us that when Gideon Welles 
sat down to his diary all restraint and repression 
disappeared. His clarity of vision, his firmness 
in his belief of what was just and right, his devO" 
tion to duty, his singular ability to estimate men 
and to portray character — all this gives even a 
casual reader a very clear conception of what 
manner of man he himself was. As for others, 
the figures that live forever in these pages are 
real people, wrestling in their various character-- 
istic ways with portentous problems, the solu^ 
tions of which we now look back upon as his^ 
toric matters long since worked out, but which 
in many instances presented very different as^ 
pects at the time from those which now are 
obvious to us. It is remarkable how the judg" 
ment of posterity as to individuals has confirmed 
Welles's contemporary estimate. 

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A Friend of Lincoln 



To cite these portraits in detail would be to 
give a catalogue of the prominent characters of 
the day. At once the greatest and, to the modern 
reader the most interesting, is that of Abraham 
Lincoln. His personality does not appear com^ 
plete and finished in any one description, but is 
a composite of comment, conversation and 
action recounted from time to time in the pages 
covering the period that elapsed before his death. 
Thus we see the gradual growing appreciation 
of his character from that early day when Welles 
noted that "much had been said and was then 
uttered by partisans of the incompetency of Mr. 
Lincoln and his unfitness," to that later cloudy 
morning when, by the bed on which the mur-- 
dered President had to be laid diagonally bC" 
cause of his great height, Welles * 'witnessed the 
wasting life of the good and great man who was 
expiring before me." Any reader of the diary 
who is also familiar with the latest study of the 
war President — that by Lord Charnwood — and 
who has read or seen Drinkwater's "Lincoln," 
is instantly aware of the value of this journal to 
the historian and the dramatist. 

Perhaps the ability to depict personality is the 
most conspicuous trait of Gideon Welles as a 

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writer. In this respect he adds to his ability to 
gauge character the expressive qualities of the 
literary artist. While his estimates of men are 
startlingly frank and definite, he is always fair, 
even toward those whom he disliked. Even in 
those biting, incisive phrases relating to his hete 
noir, Senator John P. Hale, there is something 
of the inevitable, impersonal condemnation of a 
court. 

The suggestions of a certain reserve in public 
must not be interpreted as implying any hesita^ 
tion to express the diarist's convictions when he 
considered that the occasion called for them. 
Far otherwise. Read, for example, the careful 
recitals of those deliberate, overwhelming, sledge^ 
hammer conversational blows the secretary in^ 
flicted on the head of Senator Hale when the 
opportunity at last came of loosing long pent-up 
emotions. The senator must have emerged from 
that interview a stunned, if wiser, man. 

And very early in their mutual official connect 
tion the Secretary of State discovered that Mr. 
Welles, and only Mr. Welles, was going to run 
the Navy Department. When Seward attempted 
to interfere surreptitiously with the naval ex- 
pedition to relieve Sumter he found himself in 

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a great deal of trouble, the net result of which 
may be summarized in the following quotation 
from the diary : 

"On our way thither [to see the President] Mr. Seward 
remarked that, old as he was, he had learned a lesson 
from this affair, and that was, he had better attend to his 
own business and confine his labors to his own depart^ 
ment. To this I cordially assented." 

The return of the Secretary to Hartford 
brought many memories of old times — days, 
when as editor of the "Hartford Times" he had 
worked for Jackson's election, later days when, 
slavery being injected as a moral issue into 
politics, he had abandoned the democratic creed 
and adopted the republican. Then there were 
the years when he had served as postmaster, as 
member of the general assembly, as state comp- 
troller — and, again, that searching period when 
for the sake of his convictions he was willing to 
face sure defeat as republican candidate for 
governor. For eight years he had served as a 
member of the republican national committee 
and he was chairman of his state delegation to 
the convention that nominated for the presi- 
dency the man who was to be afterward his chief 
and his staunch friend — Abraham Lincoln. We 

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have Lincoln's own word for it, as reported ver^ 
batim in the diary, that there was no wire-pul- 
ling in connection with Gideon Welles's appoint- 
ment. The fact that he was a New England man 
may have had something to do with it, but the 
real consideration was his record. 

It was a life full of service for his country and 
of devotion to the faith that was in him, that the 
old man looked back upon in the closing years. 



[146] 



IX: Our Battle Laureate 



IX: Our "Battle Laureate 



ABOUT six months before Gideon Welles 
returned to his old home, an ensign in that 
navy of which Mr. Welles was, under the Presi^ 
dent, commander-in-chief, landed in the port of 
New York on the U. S. steam frigate "Franklin". 
The "Franklin" bore the flag of Admiral Farragut, 
who was returning from a two-year command of 
our European Squadron, and the ensign, Henry 
Howard Brownell, of East Hartford, was a mem- 
ber of the great sailor's personal staff on which 
he had served during the war. 

It was the end of Brownell's service and 
travels. Four years later, on October 31, 1872, 
at the height of the Grant-Greeley campaign, he 
died at the family homestead after a long and dis- 
tressing illness. He had been born in 1820. Seven 
years before his death Dr. Holmes, in a review in 
the "Atlantic" of one of his slim volumes of 
verse, had called him * 'Our Battle Laureate." 

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Uneven as his verse was, he was a true poet. 
A spark of the divine fire had fallen upon him. 
Other activities had been attempted, but for 
him there dearly was in them no satisfaction. 
As a youth he tried mercantile life in New York, 
but abandoned it after less than a year. Teach^ 
ing seems to have been the practical — if poetry 
is not * 'practical"— pursuit which proved most 
congenial and it is singular that his first work as 
a teacher was in Mobile near which the great 
experience of his life later occurred. This short 
sojourn in the South came after his graduation 
in 1841 from Trinity College and was followed 
by study of the law in Hartford where he was 
admitted to the bar and for a short time prac^ 
ticed in partnership with his brother Charles. 

But the law was not for him. The poetic muse 
was always whispering in his ear. He saw visions 
and dreamed dreams — witness his * 'Song of the 
Archangels." Yet he was rather a direct and 
rugged sort of poet. Subtlety and indirection, 
fine shadings, carefully wrought lines, had little 
place in his methods. He appears to have been 
impatient of revision. He felt deeply and the 
need of expression was instant. Often he wrote, 
as he states in the preface to ' 'Lyrics of a Day," 

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Our Battle Laureate 



currente calamo, and most of his verses were seen 
first in the pages of the Hartford newspapers. 
In the light of modern technique many of them 
seem already a little old-fashioned. Perhaps the 
present-day undergraduate would call some of 
them "simple." Yet any of our young intellec- 
tuals might be proud of having written "In 
Articulo Mortis"; surely there is nothing very 
simple about ' The Sphinx." And one is occasion- 
ally startled by lines that have the perfect, the 
inevitable phrase — as in these from ' The Tomb 
of Columbus" — 

" .... the fragrant breath 
Of unknown tropic flowers came o'er my path, 
Wafted — how pleasantly! for I had been 
Long on the seas, and their soft, waveless glare 
Had made green fields a longing." 

It would be difficult to improve on that last 
line. Again — to most readers there will come a 
swift and dramatic vision from the two stanzas 
of "Qu'ilMourut"— 

"Not a sob, not a tear be spent 

For those who fell at his side — 
But a moan and a long lament 

For him — who might have died! 
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"Who might have lain, as Harold lay, 
A King, and in state enow — 
Or slept with his peers, like Roland 
In the Straits of Roncesvaux." 

In all his early verse there is much that is 
haunting and memorable, together with much 
that is trivial and even flippant. It was the com^ 
ing of the Civil War that made Henry Brownell 
known as a poet. Indeed he published little be^ 
fore that time. 

In our own day we have had great moral issues 
in war and we have known what the response to 
them could be. These issues were, however, in- 
volved with many other peoples, their applica- 
tion was, in a way, diffused; to different races 
they presented different aspects. But the Civil 
War was our own war, its issues were concen- 
trated; it not only involved national honor, it 
concerned, and vitally concerned, the question 
whether the nation should live. 

To these portentous messages and alarms, 
borne on every breath of the wandering breezes 
of those tense days, the spirit of Henry Brownell 
responded with an intuitive instinct, a poetic 
eloquence, akin to that of the seers and the 
prophets. 

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Our Battle Laureate 



"World, art thou 'ware of a storm? 
Hark to the ominous sound, 
How the far-off gales their battle form. 
And the great sea swells feel ground!" 

In 1860, the Hartford papers were full of his 
"fiery lyrics" and the writer — was it Hawley or 
Warner? — of an appreciation of Brownell in the 
"Courant" shortly after his death tells how 
well he remembered the day in the anxious winter 
of 1860-61 when Brownell brought into the office 
of the old "Evening Press" the manuscript of 
"Annus Memorabilis " — verses breathing a reso^ 
lution and exaltation of courage that brought a 
generous measure of fame. There is something 
about "Annus Memorabilis" — not only the 
meter which is the same — that suggests Ma- 
caulay's"Naseby," something, too, remotely sug^ 
gestive of Kipling. Into this mood of exalta- 
tion there ran occasionally a vein of humor that 
only deserves mention in the case of the verses 
"Let Us Alone," inspired by Jefferson Davis's 
statement in his inaugural address, "All we 
want is to be left alone." Though of little poetic 
merit these lines caught the popular fancy and 
were long remembered and quoted. 

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And so the war came on, and the poet's vision, 
which had been laughed at by some readers, was 
justified by events. There came defeats, almost 
countless deaths, occasional victories, doubts of 
final victory — all the ebb and flow and waste of 
war — and to it all the sensitive but vigorous 
spirit responded in many chords. Of the gentler 
lays, the most winning to the writer are the 
verses called 'The Battle Summers." Here are 
a few of the stanzas — 

"All vain — Fair Oaks and Seven Pines! 
A deeper hue than dying Fall 
May lend, is yours! — yet over all 
The mild Virginian autumn smiles. 



"We pass — we sink like summer's snow^ 
Yet on the mighty Cause shall move, 
Though every field a Cannae prove, 
And every pass a Roncesvaux. 

"Through every summer burn anew 

A battle summer, — though each day 
We name a new Aceldema, 
Or some dry Golgotha re-dew." 

On the whole, however, it was the magnifi^ 
cence, the drama, of the struggle that possessed 
him — sometimes the realization of the tremens 

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Our Battle Laureate 



dous stakes for which the game was played, 
sometimes the actual, objective romance of 
events, as in the beginning of the famous * 'River 
Fight"— 

" Would you hear of the River Fight? 
It was two of a soft spring night — 

God's stars looked down on all, 
And all was clear and bright. 
But the low fog's chilling breath — 
Up the River of Death 

Sailed the Great Admiral." 

His own participation in the fighting came 
about in a strange way. He paraphrased in verse, 
first published in the "Evening Press," the 
rather dramatic general orders preparatory to the 
* 'River Fight." Poetically it was not a great per- 
formance, but in some way it came to the atten- 
tion of Farragut who was greatly impressed. The 
acquaintance thus begun resulted in the unusual 
appointment of Brownell as master's mate on 
Farragut's staff and, shortly thereafter, as en- 
sign, with the duties of secretary. 

One can fancy the lift and glory in the heart 
of this rather retiring poet and teacher, with a 
hitherto unsatisfied thirst for action and drama, 
as he stood on the quarter-deck of the "Hart- 

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ford" fighting her way up Mobile Bay on that 
early August morning in 1864. At last he was 
in the midst of great events. This was his 
crowded hour — and the gods gave him full 
measure. Even in plain prose it is a gallant 
story. What a life-time must have been lived in 
those moments when Craven's monitor "Te- 
cumseh", off to port, making for the Confederate 
ram * 'Tennessee", struck a torpedo and went 
down; when the "Brooklyn", leading the col- 
umn, just ahead of the "Hartford", backed 
down upon the flag-ship, in fear of more torpe- 
does; when Farragut, lashed in the rigging, saw 
his line doubling up in confusion close under the 
Confederate batteries! It was then occured the 
famous colloquy and order. "What is the 
trouble?" was asked of the "Brooklyn" by the 
flag-ship and the answer — "Torpedoes." "Damn 
the torpedoes ! " shouted the Admiral. "Captain 
Drayton, go ahead! Jouett, full speed!" And 
the "Hartford," increasing speed rapidly, passed 
under the stern of the "Brooklyn" and took the 
lead, firing her starboard batteries as fast as the 
men could work. One did not need to be a poet 
to secure a thrill from such a situation, but what 
must it have meant to the creative imagination 

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that till then had pictured such scenes only in 
fancy ! 

And this was only the early part of the fight. 
Through it all Brownell took notes, as he had 
been ordered, of the progress of the action and 
literally wrote at least one stanza of ' 'The Bay 
Fight." During the battle he dropped one of his 
papers which was later found and returned to 
him with an expression of admiration that he 
could write so legibly in the midst of such ex^ 
citement. "If I were killed," he replied, "I 
didn't want any of you to think I'd been afraid." 

Probably "The Bay Fight" was Brownell's 
most famous poem, though "The River Fight" 
is generally classed with it. The ballad has its 
faults. It is too long and too detailed for modern 
taste. It is ragged in places — the poet made his 
own versification much of the time. But it has 
vigor, vividness and sincere emotion, and through 
it all runs the turmoil and thunder of the battle. 
* 'The Bay Fight " has been compared to the work 
of Campbell, Drayton and Tennyson — yet no 
one has suggested a special likeness in temper 
and methods, in its narrative portions, to ' 'The 
Ballad of the Revenge" of which it reminded 
one reader. At the close, where the meter 

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changes to a quieter rhythm, there are a tender^ 
ness and aspiration and felicity of phrasing that 
arrest even the casual reader — 

"To'day the Dahlgren and the drum 
Are dread Apostles of his name; 
His Kingdom here can only come 
By chrism of blood and flame, 

"Be strong; already slants the gold 

Athwart these wild and stormy skies; 
From out this blackened waste, behold. 
What happy homes shall rise! 



"And never fear a victor foe — 

Thy children's hearts are strong and high, 
Nor mourn too fondly — well they know 
On deck or field to die." 

The verse of the Great War and that of the Civil 
War show one marked contrast. The best poetry 
of the recent titanic struggle is individualistic. 
It reflects the re-actions of personality to the 
stress and tension, the long-drawn, desperate 
drudgery, the tragedy, and sometimes the humor, 
of the strange experience. It pictures the dreams 
of home and peace. Most of the best of it has 
been written by young soldiers, many of whom 
were novices in the poetic role. On the whole 

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the well-known poets did not come up to expec" 
tations. There were of course exceptions, but 
most of this recent verse, appealing and beauti- 
ful as it is, misses the higher vision, perhaps be- 
cause the immediate scene and the personal ex- 
perience were so overwhelming. The poets of 
our Civil War, however, were obsessed with the 
meaning of it all, with the hopes and fears for the 
country's future. Have we as yet anything in 
American verse about the Great War that we 
can place beside the best war poetry of Holmes 
and Whittier? Can we find sustained poetic in- 
spiration that compares with Lowell's "Com- 
memoration Ode"? Where as to this recent conflict 
is the lyric power of the ' 'The Battle Hymn of 
the Republic"? And, coming down to mere 
narrative and descriptive verse, what incident 
of this modern Armageddon has found among 
us its immortal ballad, as the battle of Mobile 
Bay found its eloquent poetic record in "The 
Bay Fight"? 



159 



X: The Temple of the Muses 



X: The Temple of the Muses 



To older citizens the Wadsworth Atheneum 
has an especial and peculiar charm. Doubt^ 
less more recent residents also feel this attraction, 
but it is natural that to those who as children 
lived in its shadow, as it were, the appeal should 
be strongest. 

Here we were wont to go on rainy afternoons 
to look at the illustrated papers in the reading 
room. In the historical society's quarters up- 
stairs it used to give one a peculiar thrill to sit 
on the link of the chain which during the Revo- 
lution was stretched across the Hudson at West 
Point, and which we had read about in the 
* 'Boys of 'Seventy-Six." There was, too, a cer- 
tain ghastly emotional experience to be derived 
from an inspection of the sword holes, just over 
the heart, in the waistcoat and shirt of Colonel 
Ledyard. Then there were those Saturday 
mornings spent with the good friend of all 

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children in the weekly proceedings at the Athe^ 
neum of the old "Agassiz Association." 

In those days we were reading "Kenilworth" 
and "Woodstock" and the castellated structure 
acquired in our minds a quality of mystery and 
romance. Certain precincts of the building were 
denied us and an impression gained credence 
that somewhere in the edifice, the plan of which 
we never fathomed, were secret rooms, passages 
and staircases. Certainly if ghosts walked any^ 
where the place where you would be most 
likely to find them was on some Hallowe'en 
midnight among these relics of the past. But we 
never got in at midnight — in fact nothing could 
have persuaded us to attempt such an entry. 

More mature experience removed something 
of the mystery, but the charm never entirely 
vanished. It came, however, to be exercised in 
different ways. Perhaps it was necessary during 
vacations to supplement college reading by the 
use of the historical society's library, then in^ 
stalled in the delightful quarters that had been 
the first home of the Watkinson collection. In 
many ways it seems a pity that this old library, 
with its oak bookshelves, arranged in alcoves, its 
galleries and delightful little staircases, has been 

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abandoned for modern, but less atmospheric 
quarters. It was a charming room and the only 
place of its kind in the state, except the old 
library at Yale, the proposed alteration of which 
recently created such a storm of opposition. 

It was discovered, however, that the newer 
and larger Watkinson Library also offered a 
quiet refuge when one wanted to study or read 
without interruption. Here, too, were and still 
are alcoves, galleries and staircases, but loftier, 
more imposing and triumphant than in the 
intimate and friendly and older library. The 
main room of the Watkinson is, however, an 
alluring spot where one may escape from the 
financial implications of the immediate environ^ 
ment into a world with which money and busi^ 
ness have little to do. 

Increasing years brought an interest in the 
old portraits. Our childhood acquaintance with 
the pictorial features of the Atheneum was 
chiefly confined to Trumbull's paintings of the 
Revolutionary battles. These seemed to us at 
the time perfect representations of what really 
happened at Bunker Hill, Princeton and Quebec. 
But the inevitable development of a more 
catholic artistic sense led us to dwell with a grow^ 

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ing interest on the work of some of the great 
masters displayed in the art gallery. With these 
the portraits of state and local worthies in the 
historical society's rooms could not compete 
very successfully from the standpoint of work^ 
manship, but these local portraits acquired a 
new importance as the story of the state and the 
old town took its place in our enlarging appre^ 
ciation of relative values. At least we could 
gather from them some idea of what the people 
looked like who had walked the streets where we 
had played as children and who had taken their 
parts in the building of the city, the state and 
the nation. 

We heard the story of Elizabeth Whitman and 
the portraits of her father and mother became 
something more than merely faded old pictures. 
Oliver Ellsworth was no longer only a name — 
there he was, sitting at a table with his wife, his 
familiar house visible in the distance. And when 
curiosity grew as to Daniel Wadsworth, the 
founder of the Atheneum, we were able to satisfy 
this in some degree by hunting up the two por^ 
traits of him — one as a boy, leaning on his 
father's shoulder, the other Ingham's painting 
of him in middle life. 

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THE WATKINSON I.IRRARY 



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11 

It is strange that so little has been written 
about Daniel Wadsworth. He was the original 
Maecenas of Hartford. But he had no Horace 
to celebrate him and he would have abhorred 
the publicity which the Roman patron of the 
arts and letters seems rather to have enjoyed. 
His modesty is well illustrated by the fact that 
he requested that Dr. Hawes should at his 
funeral services attempt no formal eulogy, in the 
fashion of the day. He died at ten minutes past 
one on the morning of July 28, 1848, a few days 
before his seventy-seventh birthday. Though he 
lived to this advanced age his health was always 
frail and this fact may account, in part, for 
his rather retiring disposition. 

He was, however, by no means a recluse. His 
home, altered, but still standing at the south- 
west corner of Prospect Street and Atheneum 
Street — formerly "Wadsworth's Alley," — now 
laboring under the alliterative title of ' 'Atheneum 
Annex," was the center of a simple and de- 
lightful social life. In its notice of Mr. Wads- 
worth after his death the "Courant" said of this 
home that it * 'has remained for half a century 
a scene of cheerful hospitality, where persons 

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of humble worth as well as those of distinction, 
have been received with kindness and courtesy, 
and cheered by the unclouded sunshine of Mrs. 
Wadsworth's benevolence and lovely manners.'* 

Mrs. Wadsworth was the daughter of the 
second Governor Trumbull. "Her mind," says 
Dr. Hawes, in the funeral sermon which in his 
wife's case Mr. Wadsworth did not prohibit, 
"was sprightly, inquisitive, well-balanced and 
excellently cultivated; her temper was uncom- 
monly mild, affectionate and cheerful, often ex- 
hibiting a pleasant playfulness of spirit, enliven- 
ing conversation and intercourse, but never light, 
censorious or severe; her heart replete with ten- 
derness, and alive to every social and sympathetic 
feeling." She died two years before her husband. 
Their married life extended over fifty-three years. 

After her death a Miss Sarah McClellan, who 
seems to have been a connection of Mrs. Wads- 
worth, appeared in the character of secretary 
for Mr. Wadsworth, who was very feeble during 
the last two years of his life. She kept a diary, 
now in the possession of the Connecticut His- 
torical Society, through which we get contem- 
porary glimpses of the kindly life of the old 
street, though most of the references are in the 

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nature of a catalogue of visits paid and received, 
such as, — 

"Jan. 1, 1848. Received a beautiful book as a New 
Year's present from Mrs. Sigourney . . . Judge Ells- 
worth, Doctor Grant, Mr. Clair [Clerc?] and Mr. Barnard 
called in the morning, p. m. Judge Williams, Mr. Smith 
[ Alfred?], Mr. Roswell and John Parsons called. Went 
down to see Mrs. Hudson — found her better." 

On another occasion she records how Dr. Grant 
brought to the house four children, aged from 
nine to thirteen, known as the "Apollonians," 
who were to give a concert in the evening and 
who sang to Mr. Wadsworth at his home as he 
was not well enough to attend the concert. After 
they had left Miss McClellan went to Dr. Grant's 
"and took a galvanic shock for my painful arm." 

The most valuable part of the diary historic 
cally, however, relates to the last illness of Mr. 
Wadsworth and his death on a night of mid^ 
summer thunderstorms, and this is rather long 
and rather intimate for quotation. 

In fact most of our knowledge of the founder 
of the Atheneum comes more from memories and 
traditions than from exact data. These legends 
picture him as a fragile man with a stoop, fond of 
wearing even in the house, an artist's cap and a 

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cloak, partly to protect himself from drafts, of 
which he had an exaggerated dread, partly, we 
fancy, to exemplify in his person his artistic 
ideals. 

For art was his great interest in life and his 
wealth enabled him to gratify his artistic inclina^ 
tions and to perpetuate in the city he loved a 
center for the humanities which to him seemed 
so far above riches. In a way he was a cosmo- 
politan, for he had been educated in France and 
England, accompanying his father, Jeremiah 
Wads worth, there when he was twelve years old. 
Many of the paintings and prints, of which he 
was an inveterate collector, came from Europe 
— as most examples of good art then did. 

He was himself an illustrator and painter. 
The illustrations of his friend's — Professor Ben- 
jamin Silliman's — "Tour From Hartford to 
Quebec," are by him and they include two 
views of his beautiful country seat, "Monte 
Video," on Talcott Mountain. It is characteristic 
of Professor Silliman's regard for what were 
doubtless his friend's wishes that Mr. Wads- 
worth's name is not mentioned in his description 
of the spot. We know of at least one home, and 
there are probably several, where attractive and 

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DAXIKI, WADSWORTH 

BY I'ERMISSION OF 
THE CONNECTICUT HISTORICAL SOCIETY 



The Temple of the Muses 



interesting sketches and paintings by Mr. Wads^ 
worth are still cherished. 

As the years increased upon him the care of 
his health seems to have become something of a 
pre^occupation. It is related that he had a series 
of capes of differing colors and sizes which he 
superimposed one upon another, as the weather 
grew colder, attracting thus considerable atten- 
tion in his walks abroad. In his big yellow coach 
he installed a stove in cold weather, and a smoke- 
stack, which may have caused our fellow citizens 
of that day to wonder whether they were be- 
holding a steamboat on wheels — or even a motor 
vehicle of the period. Into his pew in the south- 
west corner of the Center Church he invariably 
had a foot stove carried when attending service 
in winter. 

Looking back through the years the life of 
his time seems to have had a more friendly and 
neighborly element than our urgent affairs today 
appear to permit. Perhaps there is something of 
fancy in this, but it is not all fancy to believe that 
in the institution that bears his name Daniel 
Wadsworth has transmitted to succeeding gen- 
erations a flavor and memory of this old life, as 
well as an opportunity to know the refreshment 

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of certain things that can not be measured in 
money — the things of the mind and the spirit. 

iii 

On the whole, the portion of the Atheneum 
that was the most popular with the children of 
an older day, and became through familiarity 
the least mysterious, was the reading room. 
In retrospect this room seems to have had a 
distinct quality of its own. For one thing it 
appears, in memory, to have been characterized 
by a pervading aroma of wet umbrellas, rubbers 
and damp clothing. Probably this is due to the 
fact that one generally frequented it on rainy 
days when out-of-door pursuits were impossible. 
Somebody was always opening a window to let 
in a little air. 

At that time the room was in the northeast 
corner of the main building. Its chief furnish- 
ings were the many rows of oak reading desks, 
shaped like inverted V's, raised on standards to 
a convenient height. To these slanting surfaces 
the papers were clamped by wooden contrivances 
which materially interfered with a comprehensive 
view of all double page pictures. 

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Nevertheless one rather approved of these 
old oak reading desks. They gave a studious air 
to the room and separated the floor space into 
sections that contributed a certain effect of 
privacy. Also they concealed the upper portions 
of readers on opposite sides, or in different sec^ 
tions, from one another. It was rather diverting 
to peek underneath and endeavor to construct 
mentally from the shoes, trousers and skirts — 
they were long enough in those days — thus 
visible, the respectively corresponding upper 
sections of anatomy. After a creative effort of 
this kind it was interesting to move around to 
the other side and see how nearly right you were. 

On the whole the English illustrated papers 
were the most popular of the periodicals and 
sometimes in the attempt to secure exclusive 
possession of these there was a good deal of 
squabbling which had to be terminated by the 
young woman in charge, who, however, was 
reasonably tolerant and far more popular than 
the dragon who guarded the historical museum 
upstairs. 

The first real war any of us remembered was 
then in progress and the "Illustrated London 
News" and the London "Graphic" were full of 

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pictures of British warships bombarding Alex^ 
andria and of charging Highlanders at TeWh 
Kebir. Though soon supplanted by our own 
**Life," "Punch," too, was something of a 
favorite, with its drawings by Du Maurier of 
tall, wasp-waisted, beautiful ladies with remark^ 
able coiffures and trailing skirts, and of men with 
Dundreary whiskers, frock coats, top hats and 
monocles — all engaged in what seemed to us 
singularly inane conversation. Most of us had 
"St. Nicholas" at home and of the other Ameri^ 
can publications "Harper's Young People" 
easily held first place, with * 'Harper's Weekly" a 
close second. The girls were often discovered 
poring over "Harper's Bazaar" — an inexpli" 
cable thing to the masculine mind. That seemed 
to us a silly paper. 

In time certain habitues of the reading room 
became familiar to us — by sight, that is. There 
was, of course, the nondescript crowd of persons 
out of employment, or idlers, who came in to get 
warm or to pass an hour or two. These were the 
floating population, as it were, and the individuals 
varied with the seasons. Some of them seemed 
to be searching the advertising columns of the 
dailies for a job. Others read strange technical 

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papers — engineering magazines or trade jour- 
nals. One has often wondered since what per- 
ennial hopes, what latent ambitions, what un- 
discovered geniuses, were concealed amid this 
rather drab clientele of the reading room. 

But that some definite purposes animated 
certain devotees could not be doubted — though 
what the exact individual motives were was not 
always apparent. There was, for example, the 
queer old man — short, stocky, with gray beard 
and spectacles — whose specialty seemed to be 
the New York papers and the political and 
economic magazines. He was generally supposed 
to be a little ' 'off" and he had Doctor Johnson's 
habit when walking along the street of tapping 
with his stick every post and tree he passed. 
If he abstractedly missed one he would go back 
and rap it. We often noticed unkind urchins of 
our own age following him and reminding him 
of any omissions, for the intense joy of seeing 
him invariably return and perform this rite. Let 
us hope that none of us attempted this, though 
it can not be asserted that the temptation was 
always resisted, even if no memory of succumb- 
ing to it remains. 

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Then there was another frequenter of the 
reading room who was generally supposed to be 
not quite normal mentally. He was a kindly, 
gentle soul, however, and it is pleasant to re^ 
member that he was never the subject of ridi^ 
cule. Indeed his deprecating manner, his invari^ 
able courtesy, even to children, effectually dis^ 
armed any suggestion of the sort. We all liked 
him and perhaps he did not dislike us. He 
would come softly in, with bent head and humble 
air, put his umbrella in the rack, look about to 
ascertain what favorite papers of his had not 
been pre-empted, slide with the effect of an 
apology into some empty place, put on his 
spectacles, get out his note book and pencil and 
begin to transcribe. During each of his visits he 
was continually taking notes and the imagina^ 
tion is appalled at any effort to compute the 
number of note books he must have filled, for he 
was a constant visitor. The occupation was of 
course an obsession, a phase, no doubt, of va^ 
rious mental vagaries he harbored. Probably 
as children we missed something of the pathos of 
the fine mind thus clouded, but it is a comfort to 
remember that we did not altogether fail in 
appreciation of the spirit of the gentleman. 

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There comes dimly to memory the figure of a 
rather elderly woman who wore an old-fashioned 
bonnet and rather odd clothing of a bygone 
style. She was a busy person, flitting from paper 
to paper, forever in quest of some apparently 
elusive data. It seemed to be necessary for her 
to hold frequent consultations with the attend- 
ant. These were carried on, for her part, in loud, 
hissing whispers that were far more penetrating 
and distracting than ordinary conversation 
would have been and the good-natured presiding 
genius of the room spent much of her time look- 
ing up references for this curious and acquisitive 
visitor. What she was seeking we never knew, 
but, though it was manifestly of the utmost im- 
portance to her, one could not escape the im- 
pression of futility. Surely a public reference or 
reading room is an excellent place in which to 
study the caprices of the human mind. 

This person's audible conferences with the at- 
tendant bring to mind the notice that was promi- 
nently posted in various parts of the room, — 

Loud Talking or Prolonged 

Conversation Will Not Be 

Allowed In This Room 

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Now that the statute of limitations has barred 
civil, if not criminal proceedings, the writer will 
confess that some years later, when an under" 
graduate of Yale College, he abstracted, after 
the unoriginal fashion of his kind, one of these 
notices and took great pride in displaying it in 
a prominent place on the wall of his room at 
college where its apt and ironic message aroused 
great envy and admiration. 

But to return to our memories of the reading 
room's habitues — there was Cousin George. 
This vicarious relative was an unattached Con^ 
gregational minister who sojourned in the city 
from time to time. The nomadic character of his 
ministry was due partly to principle, partly to a 
kind of wanderlust. In this old bachelor there 
was a wandering streak — he was not happy for 
long in one place. But he had a strong social 
instinct and a keen interest in and affection for 
his friends and was greatly beloved by them. A 
great purveyor of news, he was an insatiable 
reader of the papers and toward the middle of 
the morning he invariably came into the reading 
room, as into a club, to look through the news 
of the day. His soft, black hat, overcoat with 
short shoulder cape, eyeglasses with black rib^ 

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bon and mutton-chop whiskers gave a distinct 
individuality to his appearance. About his looks 
there was an effect of oddity — and indeed, like 
most of us, he had his whimseys and peculiari- 
ties. There was little externally to indicate his 
kindly sympathy, his talent for friendship, his 
thoughtfulness for others, particularly for the 
sick. For that reason, doubtless, it was not until 
maturer years that that side of his character 
fully dawned on one. There was nothing to de- 
note this in the picture of him, seated in a good 
reading light, in one corner of the room, his cape- 
overcoat thrown back on his shoulders, his thin 
legs crossed, absorbed in last night's ' 'New York 
Evening Post." 

Like the others we have mentioned he will 
never come to the reading room again. Did they, 
we wonder, surmise that certain small eyes were 
observing them, that certain youthful person- 
alities were conferring about them, that certain 
immature minds were striving to grasp what 
manner of men and women they were? Truly 
memories of us all may live long in unsuspected 
places. 



179 



XI: The Friend of Touth 



XI: The Friend of Youth 



IT was announced the other day in the public 
prints that the Private Coachman's Benevo- 
lent Association had filed its certificate of disso- 
lution. Over this laconic statement in the morn- 
ing paper one reader, at least, paused and let his 
thoughts wander. To him there seemed a signifi- 
cant and, indeed, a rather melancholy interest in 
the announcement. The incident thus briefly 
mentioned not only marked the end of an ancient 
brotherhood ; it furnished a striking commentary 
on changing social conditions. 

As a type the private coachman is disappear- 
ing, and with him vanish the coaches, landeaus 
and victorias, the well-matched pairs of reliable 
family horses with shining harnesses and jingling 
chains, the snappy trotters, the buggy rides and 
the horse in general as a voucher of social respon- 
sibility and standing. 

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The possession of a motor car and the services 
of a chauffeur, though generally involving more 
financial outlay than a stable and coachman 
necessitated, somehow do not quite confer the 
reflected glory in which the employer of a coach- 
man used to shine. Everybody has a motor and 
the very prevalence and numerousness of the 
chauffeur, capable and loyal soul though he be, 
necessarily detract from the distinction which 
the rarer coachman used to give. 

One usually stood rather in awe of the coach- 
man — particularly in boyhood, the period with 
which he is chiefly associated in the memories of 
most of us. He was a person of strange and ex- 
alted attainments. He held mysterious and tele- 
pathetic communication with his horses. He 
understood them, and they him. He had theories 
about shoeing, he could prescribe for most of 
their ailments, he hissed at them queerly as he 
groomed them. Moreover, he had the real sport- 
ing spirit. He knew all about the performances 
of Maud S. and John L. Sullivan. He called the 
firemen and policemen by their first names and 
the fire bell would send him running out of the 
stable at any hour. 

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If the boy wanted to acquire a puppy he got 
the coachman to select it and to clip its ears 
(without anaesthetic) behind the stable — or, if 
the coachman was wise, he persuaded a friend 
to do this surgical work at some livery stable, out 
of earshot of the family. Probably when the 
puppy was grown the coachman surreptitiously 
staged fights with him against rival dogs, chap- 
eroned by brother coachmen, late at night after 
the boy and his elders were asleep, thus occasion- 
ally providing a precarious addition to his wages 
if the dog came up to expectation. To tell the 
truth, it was generally selected for its fighting 
qualities. 

He had strange tales of adventure, many of 
them doubtless fictitious, but showing the swift 
imagination of the race from which he generally 
sprang. The great event of his life was his trip 
to Philadelphia at the time of the Centennial 
when he was temporarily a soldier and had 
charge of the major's horse. For years brilliant 
lithographs of the exhibition buildings were 
tacked to the stable wall above the shelf where 
stood bottles of horse liniment and harness 
dressing. He had seen men and cities and out of 
his experience had grown a practical and homely 

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wisdom that was by no means lost upon his 
young admirers. He was the friend of youth. 

And now it seems that the guild is officially 
extinct. Hail and farewell, private coachman ! 
Though legally dissolved you are not forgotten, 
but remain ever enshrined in our memories of 
an older and simpler day. 

In those memories the coachman assumes 
multiform incarnations. The individuals varied 
as the years of childhood lengthened, but they 
all conformed to type. 

At the end of one of those dim vistas of child^ 
ish recollections, illumined by the mellow light 
that always plays about our earliest remem^ 
brances, stands the figure of Patrick, the first 
coachman of them all. His first appearance was 
so very long ago — as a life^time is measured — 
that the vision, emerging from the mists in which 
the first consciousness of the world is enveloped, 
is painted somewhat vaguely on the retina of the 
mind. How much of it is real, how much an 
idealized memory, can not perhaps be definitely 
determined. After all, it is only a picture and a 
feeling. 

One seems to remember being enthroned on a 
rug spread on the grass of the garden, beneath 

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The Friend of Youth 



the big apple tree, in the level sunlight of a late 
afternoon in spring. It must have been spring 
for the apple tree was in bloom. About one, 
seated on the grass, was grouped a circle of the 
maids of the household and their visitors. No 
experience of later years has ever given the 
slightest intimation that one could possibly be 
or become such a center of interest and admira- 
tion as that microcosm of dawning intelligence 
then consciously was to that laudatory audience. 
There was a distinct sense of being the source of 
the happiness and laughter that composed the 
mental atmosphere of that golden afternoon. 
Such an assurance that the world was entirely 
good and beautiful has not since been attained. 
Then, suddenly, Patrick was added to the 
circle — a smooth-shaven, apple-cheeked, merry 
man — having doubtless strolled over from the 
neighboring stable yard. Was it partly because 
a masculine note of admiration was added to the 
feminine chorus that the effect of general well- 
being and of mirth seemed, with his arrival, to 
be emphasized and confirmed? At all events 
there was an instinctive perception between 
Patrick and the center of interest that they 
understood each other, and Patrick was wel^ 

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corned from the rug with evidences of the recog- 
nition of this bond which precipitated another 
wave of delightful worship. 

It was the beginning of a firm friendship. 
Patrick soon shared with the nurse of those 
Elysian days the early confidences, the awaken- 
ing and absurd aspirations, of the childish mind. 
In the first cloud of trouble, which after some 
years grew from the marriage and departure of 
the nurse, he was a never failing solace. He re- 
ceived with serious consideration a carefully 
thought-out plan to compel her return by en- 
gaging one of the hook and ladder companies 
to pull down her new home, thus presumably 
leaving her without any abiding place but the 
parental roof. Seated on the front seat of the 
old carriage with his young friend, taking the air 
about the city, he assisted in plotting the details 
of this scheme. It was so subtly diluted by other 
interests, and disappeared so gradually, that 
no particular disillusion resulted. 

Why Patrick left and when remain a mystery. 
He was succeeded by a Scotchman with reddish 
whiskers and for long was lost to sight. Then, 
unexpectedly, he re-appeared. 

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One afternoon, years afterward, while calling 
at a friend's home and talking over old days, it 
developed that Patrick was still alive — a very 
old man now — that he was employed by these 
friends as gardener — that, as a matter of fact, 
he was at the moment at work in the garden. It 
was, indeed, possible to see him from the window. 
What was the meaning of that instant sense 
of doubt as to whether it would be well to walk 
over to the window? At least this hesitancy did 
not prevail and there, in a far corner, raking 
among the shrubbery, could be discerned the 
figure of a little, bowed old man in blue denim 
overalls and a weather-beaten felt hat. One 
could not see his face — his back was toward the 
window. How small he looked! Why, Patrick 
had been a fine figure of a young Irishman, not 
tall, perhaps, but of a respectable height. 

The suggestion was inevitable that it would 
be interesting to go over and talk to him. Indeed 
a start was made, but again came that impulse 
of hesitation, stronger this time and not to be 
gainsaid. Was Patrick well — was he happy? 
On the whole the answer was in the aflfirmative. 
He had, it appeared, touches of rheumatism, 
but he could still do light work, and he liked to 

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putter about the lawns and the flower beds. At 
home he was comfortable. Generally speaking, it 
seemed that life had treated him not too harshly. 
It was clear that he was with kindly people — and 
there one left him. 

After all, it is comforting to realize that the 
picture of Patrick that is best remembered is not 
of a bent old man, leaning somewhat heavily 
upon his rake, but of the figure that takes shape 
out of the mists of childhood — a figure that 
somehow always personifies the attributes of 
kindliness and sympathy — standing in a long 
vanished garden, beneath an apple tree in bloom. 



190 



XII: The Christmas Party 



XII: The Christmas Party 



WE always stood rather in awe of Ray^ 
mond's Uncle Horace because it was 
said he had once taught Latin in a boys' school. 
Any one who had ever wielded the power of a 
teacher was a person with a background of au- 
thority and importance whom one could not 
approach too familiarly. Indeed, it would have 
been difficult to be familiar with Raymond's 
Uncle Horace under any conceivable circumstan- 
ces, for he was essentially a dignified and aloof 
person. 

It was understood that the abandonment of 
teaching had been caused by failing health and to 
the same origin was perhaps due the reserve and 
apparent preoccupation that militated against 
any real intimacy with his nephew's young 
friends. There was some vague story of a young 
wife who had died years before, but an experi- 
ence of that sort was so far beyond our compre- 

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hension that the rumor added but little to the 
isolation in which Raymond's uncle seemed to 
dwell. He was never really an actor in the drama 
of our young lives. Sometimes appearing in the 
wings, more often in the critic's seat, he was an 
onlooker rather than a participant. 

One remembers him chiefly as walking back 
and forth on the old street between Raymond's 
grandfather's house and certain indefinite rooms 
he dwelt in which were probably in the edifice 
then known as the Charter Oak building. 

The impression that persists is of one very 
carefully wrapped up against the weather. He 
wore a long ulster, a seal-skin cap, with a visor, 
and about his neck, under his iron-gray beard, 
a muffler was efficiently disposed. His large, 
gold-rimmed spectacles gave him the customary 
owlish, peering expression, but in spite of them 
he could not seem to recognize us, or any one 
else, except when close at hand. He carried a 
stout walking stick, the point of which he never 
raised from the ground, but dragged after him 
between alternate steps and he stood so straight 
that he appeared to lean a little backward. It 
would seem that in the warmer seasons this 
habitual manner of dress must have been modi- 

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fied, but there is no recollection of any other 
costume. 

A tradition of immense learning clung about 
him. It was said that in his mysterious rooms 
the walls were lined with books which he spent 
all his time in reading. It was even whispered 
that he read Latin and Greek for fun — and no 
higher intellectual achievement than this could 
be imagined. There was something facile and 
careless, too, about the idea of reading for 
pleasure dead languages with which we had as 
yet no acquaintance but which loomed as edu" 
cational obstacles in the not distant future. 
This casual facility appealed to our youthful 
sporting spirit and compelled a reluctant ad- 
miration. Whatever Raymond's uncle's short- 
comings as an intimate might be, he had at 
least reached the point where matters that were 
soon to be weighty problems to us were to him 
merely a question of amusement. 

Raymond's grandparents lived in an old house 
around the corner from the old street. Their 
home was, in fact, one of the oldest houses in the 
city. They were people of wealth for that day 
and the house had been brought up to date in 
the fashion of that time when the finer harmonies 

[1951 



The Friendly Club 



of the antique were not as yet appreciated. 
Plate glass windows had replaced the small 
panes, hard wood floors covered the fine oak 
planking and varnished inside shutters had sup^ 
planted the dignified panelling of the originals. 
But our aesthetic appreciations, like those of our 
elders, noticed no incongruity. To us the old 
house was the acme of contemporary good taste, 
as well as the abode of comfort and even luxury. 
It was here that Raymond's grandparents gave 
their annual Christmas party for their grandson 
and his friends. This was a festival famous in the 
young life of that neighborhood. Its celebrity 
was chiefly due to the Gargantuan amount of 
delightful food available. There was a tree, of 
course, but the presents were of the edible, 
rather than the permanent kind, and no less 
appreciated on that account. Nowhere else was 
there to be found such an amount and variety 
of candy, fruit, ice cream, cake, nuts, raisins, 
chicken salad, sandwiches, jellies, jams, pate de 
faies gras, and other pleasing forms of nourish^ 
ment — to say nothing of lemonade and various 
kinds of ''shrub" — as at Raymond's Christmas 
party. At the close of each of these events it did 
not seem that we could ever eat again, yet there 

[1961 



The Christmas Party 



was a certain assurance of the continuance of the 
fete in carrying home a paper bag containing 
an orange, an apple and a generous selection of 
sweets. 

After the assembly had been fed there were 
games— "Drop the Handkerchief," "Still Pond, 
No More Moving," that perennial juvenile 
pastime where the participants chant the mem" 
orable chorus beginning * 'Oats, peas, beans and 
barley grow," and sometimes, much against the 
sentiments of the boys, that embarrassing game 
where the player who became "It" was com^ 
pelled to "Bow to the wittiest, kneel to the pret" 
tiest and kiss the one you love best." The boys 
decided early in their social experience that no 
self-respecting male ought to play this game and 
it soon fell into disrepute, though the girls fought 
for its continuance for a time. 

Youthful spirits rise with food as rapidly as 
does a thermometer under the sun's rays and a 
good deal of noise and romping invariably ac- 
companied these games. Raymond's dear old 
grandfather and grandmother enjoyed all these 
manifestations of young life as keenly, so far 
as we could see, as did the children themselves, 
but Uncle Horace, it was evident, did not like 

[197] 



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noise and confusion. Memory pictures him 
standing in the background of the party, as in 
the background of life, a quiet spectator, blink^ 
ing shortsightedly but not unkindly, through 
his big spectacles, and vanishing altogether as 
the excitement increased. 

Once one of the youthful guests, while the 
festivities were at their height, wandered into a 
remote part of the house in search of some ac^ 
cessory required for an approaching game and 
entered by a rear door a room where Uncle Hor- 
ace had been reading. He had put his book down 
in his easy chair and was now discovered stand- 
ing in the other doorway, his back to the room. 

An intense curiosity to look at one of Uncle 
Horace's learned volumes took possession of the 
interloper and at that age it did not occur to him 
that delicacy might demand some hesitation. 
He tiptoed over to the chair expecting to see on 
the cushion some calf-bound, ancient tome 
written in characters that were hieroglyphics to 
him. But a complete reversal of his ideas about 
Uncle Horace was at hand. The book that lay 
there was in blue-and-gold cloth binding and 
was a copy of the first edition of ' 'Huckleberry 
Finn." 

[1981 



The Christmas Party 



The intruder looked in some astonishment at 
the spare figure of Raymond's uncle and per- 
ceived that there was no danger of discovery for 
the attitude was that of a man completely 
absorbed. He was listening intently. At this dis- 
tance the general hubbub was softened and there 
was a rather wistful quality in the childish voices 
rising and falling with the lilting old refrain: 

"Thus the farmer sows his seeds, 
Thus he stands and takes his ease, 
Stamps his foot (bang!) and claps his hand (smack!) 
And looks around to view the land." 

After the lapse of a good many years it is this 
picture of Raymond's Uncle Horace that is the 
most vivid. There was some implication in the 
listening figure, with head slightly bowed, one 
hand resting on the casing of the doorway, that 
carried, even to a childish mind, a suggestion of 
hitherto unsuspected aspects of the rather 
lonely widower's personality. At the time it was 
all very vague and unformulated and later specu- 
lation has hesitated somewhat before the privacy 
thus unwittingly invaded. Yet afterward one 
could not help at least wondering what visions 
of his own childhood he saw as he listened to the 

fl99] 



The Friendly Club 



silly old lines of the ancient folk game, handed 
down through so many generations and bearing 
their little testimony to the continuity of ex^ 
perience. 

A tardy sense of eavesdropping awoke at last 
in the youthful visitor's mind — an understanding 
that he did not belong there. He slipped out as 
quietly as he had entered, but he took with him 
a dawning appreciation of a new incarnation of 
Raymond's Uncle Horace. 



200 



XIII: The Fabric of a Dream 



XIII: The Fabric of a Dream 



"And that night . . . . a dream of that place came to 
Florian, a dream which did for him the office of a finer sort 
of memory, bringing its object to mind with a great clearness, 
yet, as sometimes happens in dreams, raised a little above 
itself, and above ordinary retrospect. The true aspect of the 
place .... the fashion of its doors, its hearths, its windows, 
the very scent upon the air of it, was with him in sleep for a 

season " 

— The Child in the House. 

COUSIN MARY'S home was a little, old, 
brick house standing flush with the street. 
A woodshed where the cat slept in summer ex- 
tended easterly from the house and in the angle 
thus formed was a diminutive garden where such 
old-fashioned flowers as holly-hocks, bachelors' 
buttons, sweet william and larkspur seemed to 
bloom earlier and last longer than elsewhere. 

Everything about Cousin Mary's home was on 
a small scale. She herself was a very small and 
slight old lady, but she had inherited from the 

[203] 



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hardy New England race from which she sprang 
a certain tradition of vitality and longevity 
which she lived long enough to exemplify in her 
own person. Other family legends of uncom^ 
fortable eccentricity and general worrisomeness 
she utterly disproved, for never was there a 
kindlier or more placid soul than she. 

Of course she wore a cap with lavender rib^ 
bons and gowns of black bombazine for every 
day and black silk with lace at the throat for 
great occasions. She seldom ventured out of 
doors, except into her garden, or, on such annual 
celebrations as Thanksgiving and Christmas, to 
a neighboring relative's home where she was with 
difficulty persuaded to take at dinner a glass of 
port or Madeira, though she always protested 
that she did not really need it. Most of her life 
was spent in the southeast downstairs sitting- 
room, where she used to sit in the smallest, oldest 
rocking-chair ever seen. On memorable occasions 
she would take possession of the kitchen, against 
the protests of Drusilla, her companion, and 
make gingerbread that was famous in the neigh- 
borhood, especially among the children. 

To childish imaginations there always seemed 
something mysterious about the rooms in Cousin 

[204] 



The Fabric of a Dream 



Mary's house — doubtless merely because we 
never visited them, — except the sitting-room 
and the kitchen. The sitting-room communicated 
with another room — I think it was called the 
"parlor" — by folding doors. These were gen- 
erally open, but in there the blinds were always 
closed and the room was in a kind of perpetual 
dusky twilight. We could dimly see within, 
but no recollection of entering remains, though 
there is a faint memory of an obscure marble- 
topped center-table — were there not wax flowers 
on it under a glass cover? — and ancient mahog- 
any chairs. 

We never reached the upper floors, at least 
till after Cousin Mary's death, when it seems as 
if there was an expedition to the attic in company 
with some older person of authority. It was a 
brief and somewhat nervous experience. Those 
were the days when all ghost stories might possi- 
bly be true and the attic, like the "parlor," was 
dark. The visit was long enough to leave only a 
memory of dim corners, piles of old horse-hide 
trunks, a remarkable collection of ancient cook- 
ing utensils adapted for use over the open fires 
of colonial and Revolutionary days — where, we 
wonder, has all this old kitchen equipage gone? 

[2051 



The Friendly Club 



— and rafters from which hung dried roots and 
leaves of one kind and another. It was a distinct 
relief to get out of doors again. 

But of course the mysterious qualities we at^ 
tributed to certain precincts of Cousin Mary's 
house existed entirely in our youthful minds. 
No one could be imagined who had less to con^ 
ceal than this serene old lady. Yet it was natural 
that there should be romantic stories about her. 

She had never married and it was not strange 
that speculations about her past should concern 
themselves with early love affairs. These fancies 
crystallized into the quite customary tradition 
that she had been engaged in her early youth to 
a young man whose future was then so uncertain 
that her parents objected to the match. The 
years have dimmed recollection of the details of 
the story — there were other romantic complica^ 
tions — but at all events the young man after^ 
wards married another and lived to disprove the 
early doubts of sceptical parents as to his chance 
of success in life. But Cousin Mary remained 
true to her early love. 

Many years after her death one of the children 
who used occasionally to call upon her, and to 
whom even now the odor of certain old-fashioned 

[2061 



The Fabric of a Dream 



flowers will bring back a vivid picture of that 
little garden, had a curious dream about her. 

He was again in that familiar sitting-room, 
but in some way he was invisible to the other 
two occupants. One was of course Cousin Mary 
— but quite a different Cousin Mary. Youth had 
come back to her. She was a young girl again — 
and one of the prettiest young girls the dreamer 
had ever seen. Her hair was dressed high at the 
back of her head. A great comb was in it. Curls 
hung down over her cheeks, as sitting in the 
familiar diminutive rocking-chair she bent her 
head forward listening to the words of her visitor. 
Old lace was about her throat which was of a 
singular whiteness and beauty. Her gown was 
of some shimmering stuff, high-waisted, with 
many flounces. Her whole figure gave the be- 
holder a sense of delicate and rather fragile 
beauty. She was a creature of race — a thorough- 
bred. 

Seated close before her and talking softly and 
eagerly was a good-looking young man in the 
uniform of a naval officer of, I should guess, the 
period of the second war with Great Britain. 
His sword and cap lay on the floor beside his 
chair. 

[207] 



The Friendly Club 



Incongruities in dreams are generally ac- 
cepted without surprise, but in this case the 
sleeper afterward recalled a sense of astonish- 
ment at the character of this stranger. Who was 
he? So far as was known no sailor had ever 
been associated with Cousin Mary's life. 

Even in dreams a sense of the proprieties 
sometimes follows one and it was evident to the 
dreamer that his presence was superfluous. He 
turned to the dark "parlor" and for the first 
time entered. 

It was a queer place. All sorts of curios from 
the East were scattered about it — yet "scat- 
tered" is not the right word for there was a 
method in the arrangement, grotesque though 
it was. The dreamer, however, had little op- 
portunity to observe all this for he was drawn 
at once to a corner where was a strange, spiral 
staircase, built of some light Indian wood, and 
leading through the ceiling to the story above. 
He ascended and emerged into the unknown 
region overhead. 

It was a wonderful place. The details are gone 
— one recalls only an impression of happiness, 
sunshine, scents of exotic flowers, the singing of 
innumerable birds, the tinkling sound of a hid- 

[208] 



The Fabric of a Dream 



den fountain. It was no longer a room — it was 
a new country. Here, it seemed, dwelt peace, 
content, beauty. A fragment of a familiar poem 
drifted into the dreamer's fancies — 

"It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles 
And see the great Achilles whom we knew — " 

And there was more than a sense of well-being. 
There was, for a little moment, a fantastic sen- 
sation of fulfillment in one's presence there. 
There was a feeling of power. Here, one was 
somehow assured, ambitions would be accom- 
plished, hopes would come true. Here could be 
done the things one always wanted to do. 

The dreamer wished to go on, to explore, to 
find the happy secret of this region, but this, for 
some reason, was denied him. Some all-powerful 
influence compelled him to go back, to descend 
the little staircase into the darkened parlor. 

Standing there he looked through the open 
folding doors into the well-known sitting-room 
and the picture he saw halted him. 

Cousin Mary and her sailor lover were stand- 
ing in the middle of the room. His arms were 
about her, her hands were on his shoulders, her 
face raised to his . . . . 

[209] 



The Friendly Club 



Almost as soon as it was perceived the vision 
began to fade, receding slowly into the formless, 
tenuous clouds of semi-consciousness. In a 
moment the sleeper awoke. For an instant it was 
difficult to disassociate from the spirit of his 
dream the golden light of the early spring morn- 
ing, the twittering of birds, the light drip from 
the eaves of the brief rain left by the vanished 
April shower. 

The later history of the spot where Cousin 
Mary dwelt offers its commentary on a fast 
changing civilization. Soon after her death the 
little brick house was pulled down and the cubic 
space it occupied was filled with heavy machin- 
ery which daily filled with its reverberations this 
place which was once the very epitome of quie- 
tude. Now, in their turn, the huge presses have 
given way to one corner of a vast office building 
where an army of busy clerks pursues the urgent 
and exacting routine of a great corporation. 

The Latin poets liked to believe that every 
locality had its own peculiar divinity — the 
' 'genius of the place." What has become of the 
goddess who for so long dedicated to peaceful- 
ness this abode of a benign old age? Is it that she 

[2101 



The Fabric of a Dream 



was so closely identified with the one who dwelt 
there that when that life ceased the guardian 
angel fled with the departing spirit to some still 
fairer abode — or is the genius of the place really 
called Memory, who, in the minds of those who 
cherish her, effectually preserves against any 
merely material desecration the places she once 
held dear? 



211] 



XI F: The §luiet Life 



XIF: The Quiet Life 



"More than half a century of life has taught me that most 
of the wrong and folly which darkens earth is due to those 
who cannot possess their souls in quiet; that most of the good 
which saves mankind from destruction comes of life that is 
led in thoughtful stillness." 

— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. 

WITH the thoughtless cruelty of childhood 
we used to call him "Thermometer" 
Tatlock because he was forever watching the 
temperature. The tradition was that whenever 
he went down cellar to look at the furnace he 
arrayed himself in overcoat, fur cap, muffler and 
arctics. Nicknames are not always brutal and 
the cruelty of this case lay only in the peculiar 
features of the situation — the fact, in short, that 
the subject of our joke was such a gentle, retiring, 
almost apologetic old gentleman. He was de^ 
precatory even toward us children. To adult 
reflection it seems ruthless to have made any 
fun of him at all. 

[215 1 



The Friendly Club 



Yet there was no doubt about the fact that he 
was an odd character. The incarnation of bash- 
fulness, he was, like most bashful persons, per- 
sistent and consistent in doing just exactly as 
he liked so far as the demands of a world, not 
primarily constituted for people of his stripe, 
allowed. It must be confessed that, in modern 
parlance, he got away with it pretty successfully. 

Probably this was because he was wise enough 
not to demand very much. It did not seem that 
either the rise and fall of nations or of the stock 
market gave him very much concern. Doubtless 
he did not disturb himself greatly over the ques- 
tion of who was to be the next president. His 
chief worry seemed to be the weather, though 
why he should have troubled himself about this, 
when most of his life was spent indoors, remains 
a mystery. Memory seems to recall some story 
of ill-health in early life which perhaps inculcated 
a habit of consulting weather conditions that 
lasted as long as life itself — and he lived to a 
green old age. 

The spacious brick mansion that was his home 
stood sideways, as it were, to the street, behind 
a tall fence with panelled posts and blunt, 
rounded pickets, like large broomsticks of alter- 

[2161 



The Quiet Life 



nating heights. Both the main front door and 
what we should now call the service entrance 
were reached by a gravelled driveway with a 
flag walk beside it that terminated around in the 
rear of the house at the stable. Narrow flights 
of steps with wrought-iron railings, topped here 
and there with brass balls, led to the two doors. 

The entrance hall was almost square, a pas^ 
sage way running off toward the kitchen from 
the left-hand farther corner and the staircase 
ascending on one's left as one entered. At the 
landing, half way up, was a large window, open- 
ing to the north, which illumined the hall and 
stair-well with an even, rather bare light. Some- 
where in the wall was a recess in which stood a 
bust of Cicero, of which the eyes, formed without 
indication of the pupils after the fashion of its 
period of sculpture, gave an effect of blindness 
fascinating to the childish imagination. 

On the right was a little room where Mr. Tat- 
lock's sister, a dear old lady who always wore a 
little flat lace cap with a black bow, generally 
sat knitting. Straight ahead was the parlor 
where occasionally, when Mr. Tatlock's niece 
was visiting at the house, there were subdued 
children's parties. On these occasions he was 

[2171 



The Friendly Club 



never visible. His own room was the library, 
east of the parlor, with a southern exposure to^ 
ward the garden. 

Here we never entered, but once or twice we 
caught a glimpse of the interior through the door 
left unguardedly open by some momentary 
oversight. The picture thus presented had as 
its background the south wall of the room with 
its two windows between which stood the chim^ 
ney piece. Above the mantle, which was sup" 
ported by miniature Ionic columns, hung a por^ 
trait of a gentleman with a great deal of hair and 
shirt frill, and below a bright fire burned, partly 
concealed by a fire screen, beside which, reading 
in a large easy chair, was Mr. Tatlock. Recollect 
tion is still vivid of the startled, rather furtive 
glance, the look of a timid animal whose place 
of refuge had been discovered, directed toward 
us as we peeked in. 

What was the old man reading as he sat there 
day after day and year after year, while presi^ 
dents were elected, national policies inaugurated 
and abondoned, the maps of the world changed 
here and there, automobiles invented, and the 
children grew up, went to college, got married 
and left the old street? Probably no one knows 

[218] 



The Quiet Life 



for a certainty, but we should be willing to guess 
that his favorites were Burke, the Spectator, 
Boswell's Johnson, Pope, Charles Lamb, Leigh 
Hunt and perhaps Gibbon. Did he, we wonder, 
ever read a novel? If so, it is doubtful whether 
he got much beyond Jane Austen and Mrs. 
Gaskell. 

The house had a lovely old garden that stretched 
away to the east, down a slope that was broken 
into two or three terraces. At the eastward end 
was a level portion where the box-lined gravel 
walk from the house made a circle around an old 
oak tree under which was a bench. There were 
a good many old fashioned flowers and shrubs in 
the garden and some pear trees, but who took 
care of the pruning and gardening, except Mr 
Tatlock's sister who assuredly could not do it 
all, is still unexplained. 

There was a hired man whom we called ' 'Mis^ 
ter" O'Neil who sometimes went to the post 
office and may have done other errands, but as 
his title implies he seems to have been above 
gardening. At any rate there is no recollection of 
seeing him at work in the garden. In spite of his 
name there was nothing in his appearance that 
indicated Irish extraction. He was not a hired 

[219] 



The Friendly Club 



man at all in the New England sense; he was 
more the type of the confidential servant of the 
English novelists. He was dark, wore a beard, 
dressed habitually in black and looked like a 
particularly doleful undertaker. 

We never saw Mr. Tatlock and "Mister" 
O'Neil together and yet imagination — perhaps 
it is only imagination— somehow groups them as 
a pair of confidants. In a way their characterise 
tics were similar. Both were inscrutable, quiet 
persons, content to remain in the background. 
For all of them the world might wag. In our 
imaginations at least, "Mister" O'Neil knew all 
about Mr. Tatlock. He accepted the other's 
peculiar reticences, so like his own, as a matter 
of course; he knew his innocent secrets; he even 
could tell, if he wished, what books he read there 
before the fire that burned from September to 
June. With this taciturn individual we doubted 
if Mr. Tatlock was bashful. Possibly their 
mutual congeniality of temperament centered 
about the furnace, for they both watched it. 

"Mister" O'Neil could have revealed, we be^ 
lieve, what the shock was that we all decided 
Mr. Tatlock must have received early in life. 
The girls were convinced that this shock was 

[2201 



The Quiet Life 



emotional — an unhappy love affair, or the death 
of some dear friend. The boys, on the other 
hand, were inclined to talk about a purely physi- 
cal catastrophe — a runaway accident, perhaps, 
or a blow on the head from a highway robber. 
For all of these surmises we had not the slightest 
foundation, except in fancy, and mature reflec- 
tion leads to the conclusion that probably we 
were entirely in error. It seems now much more 
likely that this old bachelor's oddities were due 
to life-long frail health. 

And yet one can never be sure and somehow 
one glimpse of Mr. Tatlock which it was per- 
mitted one of the children to catch hinted, in- 
explicably and without any particular warrant; 
at other possibilities. It was the only out-of- 
door memory of him that is left. The boy, 
who still remembers well that spring day, was in 
the next yard, hanging over the fence looking 
into Mr. Tatlock's garden when he suddenly 
became aware that Mr. Tatlock himself was 
sitting on the bench in the circle the path made 
around the old tree. The old gentleman did not 
see the small spectator who had been betrayed 
into an unaccustomed quietness by the absence 
of companions and some subtle and unacknowl- 

[2211 



The Friendly Club 



edged influence of the first warm afternoon of the 
year. 

Nothing whatever happened. Mr. Tatlock 
sat there, looking up from time to time at the 
young leaves above him, tapping his stick on the 
soft turf and smiling to himself. Of what long^ 
gone springs was he dreaming? It was clear 
that whatever his thoughts were, they were 
happy ones. 

Probably to most boys the ideal life is one that 
comprises ' 'the joy of eventful living." Here for 
the first time it dawned upon this youthful inter- 
loper that one could be happy in quietness and 
seculsion. There were, it appeared, certain 
satisfactions in other careers than those of the 
cowboy and the soldier. Up to this time the boy 
had never been able to understand why heaven 
was so often spoken of as a place of rest. He did 
not understand wholly now, but a later compre- 
hension had here its inception. 

And so let us remember Mr. Tatlock sitting, 
lost in meditation, in his garden. After all he was 
not without influence in his environment, un- 
obtrusive soul that he was. He made himself 
felt in his little world. He counted. The boy who 
watched him over the fence that day thought of 

[222] 



W 9 5 



The Quiet Life 



him again when he read in a recent essay : ' 'The 
truth is that a man's life is the expression of his 
temperament and that what eventually matters 
is his attitude and relation to life .... not 
only his performance." 



223 














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